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Automated Dating of Medieval Manuscripts with a New Dataset

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Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2024 Workshops (ICDAR 2024)

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Abstract

Automated manuscript dating is a long-awaited valuable tool for scholars in their research of historical documents. This study presents a new dataset of medieval Hebrew manuscripts annotated with dates. Our initial experiments focus on documents written in the Ashkenazi square script, allowing us to refine our methodologies in a manageable setting before addressing more complex script types. Also, to accurately reflect the script’s historical evolution, we adopt a novel classification approach for time periods of varying lengths, which acknowledges the uneven development of the script over time. We perform extensive experimentation with a variety of deep-learning models and show that the regression approach is more appropriate for estimating the date of the manuscript compared to categorical classification.

D. Vasyutinsky-Shapira—The participation of Dr. Daria Vasyutinsky Shapira was funded by the European Union (ERC, MiDRASH, Project No.@ 101071829). Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Boraq Madi, Nour Atamni & Jihad El-Sana

  2. Shamoon College of Engineering, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Boraq Madi, Vasily Tsitrinovich & Irina Rabaev

  3. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira

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  1. Boraq Madi
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  2. Nour Atamni
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  3. Vasily Tsitrinovich
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  4. Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira
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  5. Jihad El-Sana
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  6. Irina Rabaev
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Boraq Madi or Nour Atamni .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nantes Université, Nantes, France

    Harold Mouchère

  2. Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China

    Anna Zhu

A Appendix

A Appendix

Fig. 4.
figure 4

Distribution of manuscripts/pages over the years

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Fig. 5.
figure 5

Examples of the extracted patches. The patches are extracted with an average of 5 lines per patch.

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Table 6. Mean and Median Errors for Test and Blind Test Sets
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Fig. 6.
figure 6

The difference between the mean and median values on the blind test for each model

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Madi, B., Atamni, N., Tsitrinovich, V., Vasyutinsky-Shapira, D., El-Sana, J., Rabaev, I. (2024). Automated Dating of Medieval Manuscripts with a New Dataset. In: Mouchère, H., Zhu, A. (eds) Document Analysis and Recognition – ICDAR 2024 Workshops. ICDAR 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14936. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70642-4_8

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