Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities (Jun 2023)

OCR17: Ground Truth and Models for 17th c. French Prints (and hopefully more)

  • Simon Gabay,
  • Thibault Clérice,
  • Christian Reul

DOI
https://doi.org/10.46298/jdmdh.6492
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 2023, no. Dataset

Abstract

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Machine learning begins with machine teaching: in the following paper, we present the data that we have prepared to kick-start the training of reliable OCR models for 17th century prints written in French. The construction of a representative corpus is a major challenge: we need to gather documents from different decades and of different genres to cover as many sizes, weights and styles as possible. Historical prints containing glyphs and typefaces that have now disappeared, transcription is a complex act, for which we present guidelines. Finally, we provide preliminary results based on these training data and experiments to improve them.

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