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HDPA: historical document processing and analysis framework

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Abstract

Nowadays, the accessibility of digitized historical documents is extremely important to facilitate fast and efficient retrieval of historical information and knowledge extraction from such data. To provide such functionality, it is necessary to convert document images into plain text using optical character recognition (OCR). Many OCR related methods and tools have been proposed, however, they are often too complicated for a standard user, some important parts are missing or they are not available in free versions. Therefore, this paper describes a complex and flexible web framework for historical document manipulation and analysis with the main focus on OCR. The framework contains eight modules to facilitate three main tasks: image pre-processing and segmentation, creation of data for OCR model training and the OCR itself. This framework is freely available for non commercial purposes. We have experimentally evaluated this framework on real data and we have shown that this system is efficient and can save human labour in the process of annotated data preparation. Moreover, we have reached state-of-the-art OCR results.

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  2. https://www.abbyy.com/.

  3. http://www.portafontium.cz/.

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Acknowedgements

This work has been partly supported from ERDF “Research and Development of Intelligent Components of Advanced Technologies for the Pilsen Metropolitan Area (InteCom)” (no.: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/17\_048/0007267), by Cross-border Cooperation Program Czech Republic - Free State of Bavaria ETS Objective 2014–2020 (project no. 211). and by Grant No. SGS- 2019-018 Processing of heterogeneous data and its specialized applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NTIS-New Technologies for the Information Society, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Plzeň, Czech Republic

    Ladislav Lenc & Pavel Král

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Faculty of Applied Sciences, University of West Bohemia, Univerzitní 8, 306 14, Plzeň, Czech Republic

    Jiří Martínek & Pavel Král

  3. Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Anguelos Nicolao & Vincent Christlein

Authors
  1. Ladislav Lenc
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  2. Jiří Martínek
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  3. Pavel Král
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  4. Anguelos Nicolao
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  5. Vincent Christlein
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Correspondence to Pavel Král.

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Lenc, L., Martínek, J., Král, P. et al. HDPA: historical document processing and analysis framework. Evolving Systems 12, 177–190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12530-020-09343-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12530-020-09343-4

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