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International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition

ICFHR 2022: Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition pp 49–64Cite as

Date Recognition in Historical Parish Records

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13639))

Abstract

In Northern Europe, parish records provide centuries of lineage information, useful not only for settling inheritance disputes, but also for studying hereditary diseases, social mobility, etc. The key information to extract from scans of parish records to obtain lineage information is dates: birth dates (of children and their parents) and dates of baptisms. We present a new dataset of birth dates from Danish parish records and use it to benchmark different approaches to handwritten date recognition, some based on classification and some based on transduction. We evaluate these approaches across several experimental protocols and different segmentation strategies. A state-of-the-art transformer-based transduction model exhibits lower error rates than image classifiers in most scenarios. The image classifiers can nevertheless offer a compelling trade-off in terms of accuracy and computational resource requirements.

Supported by Novo Nordisk Foundation (grant NNF 20SA0066568).

L. C. Piqueras, C. Fierro, J. F. Lotz, and P. Rust—Equal Contribution.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An example page can be found at: https://www.sa.dk/ao-soegesider/da/billedviser?epid=17125564#167405,28108453.

  2. 2.

    Future work includes the integration of other columns containing dates in our training set.

  3. 3.

    github.com/coastalcph/mgr-birthdates.

  4. 4.

    https://pytorch.org/vision/stable/models.html.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/trocr#fine-tuning-and-evaluation.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/NVIDIA/apex.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Laura Cabello Piqueras, Constanza Fierro, Jonas F. Lotz, Phillip Rust, Christian Igel, Desmond Elliott & Anders Søgaard

  2. ROCKWOOL Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jonas F. Lotz

  3. The Danish National Archives, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Joen Rommedahl & Jeppe Klok Due

  4. Centre for Integrated Register-based Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Carsten B. Pedersen

  5. Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Israfel Salazar

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  1. Laura Cabello Piqueras
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  2. Constanza Fierro
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Correspondence to Laura Cabello Piqueras .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Walmart Inc., Hoboken, NJ, USA

    Utkarsh Porwal

  2. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Alicia Fornés

  3. National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan

    Faisal Shafait

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Piqueras, L.C. et al. (2022). Date Recognition in Historical Parish Records. In: Porwal, U., Fornés, A., Shafait, F. (eds) Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition. ICFHR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13639. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21648-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21648-0_4

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