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tranScriptorium

Project description


ICT for access to cultural resources
The aim of tranScriptorium is to develop innovative, cost-effective solutions for the indexing, search and full transcription of historical handwritten document images, using modern, holistic HTR tech

tranScriptorium aims to develop innovative, efficient and cost-effective solutions for the indexing, search and full transcription of historical handwritten document images, using modern, holistic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. TranScriptorium will turn HTR into a mature technology by addressing the following objectives:

  • Enhancing HTR technology for efficient transcription
    Departing from state-of-the-art HTR approaches, tranScriptorium will capitalize on interactive-predictive techniques for effective and user-friendly computer-assisted transcrition.
  • Bringing the HTR technology to users
    Expected users of the HTR technology belong mainly to two groups: a) individual reserachers with experience in handwritten documents transcription interested in transcribing specific documents. b) volunteers which collaborate in large transcription projects.
  • Integrating the HTR results in public web portals
    The HTR technology will become a support in the digitization of the handwritten materials. The outcomes of the tranScriptorium tools will be attached to the published handwritten document images. This includes not only full, correct transcriptions, but also partially correct transcription and other kinds of automatically produced metadata, useful for indexing and searching.

Huge amounts of handwritten historical documents are being published by on-line digital libraries world wide. However, for these raw digital images to be really useful, they need be annotated with informative content. The tranScriptorium project aims to develop innovative, efficient and cost-effective solutions for the indexing, search and full transcription of historical handwritten document images, using modern, holistic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. For typical handwritten text images of historical documents, currently available text image recognition technologies are not suitable. Traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is simply not usable since characters can not be isolated automatically in these images. Therefore, holistic, segmentation-free HTR techniques, often borrowed from the field of Automatic Speech Recognition are needed. Yet, state-of-the-art holistic HTR approaches still lack the required accuracy, mainly due to the usual poor quality, degradations and writing style variability of historical document images. To cope with this lack of recognition accuracy for handwritten text images of historical documents, three actions are planned in tranScriptorium: i) improve basic image preprocessing and holistic HTR techniques; ii) develop novel indexing and keyword searching approaches, mainly based on byproducts of holistic HTR decoding and word spotting techniques; and iii) capitalize on new, user-friendly interactive-predictive HTR approaches for computer-assisted operation, which minimize the user intervention needed to achieve full, high quality transcripts. HTR tools based on tranScriptorium techniques will be incorporated into HTR web platforms that will be accessible to users through two different means: i) a content provider portal that provides access to handwritten historical documents for casual, individual researchers; and b) a specialized HTR web portal for structured crowd-sourcing transcription projects.

Call for proposal

FP7-ICT-2011-9
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE VALENCIA
EU contribution
€ 513 836,00
Address
CAMINO DE VERA SN EDIFICIO 3A
46022 Valencia
Spain

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Region
Este Comunitat Valenciana Valencia/València
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Administrative Contact
José Antonio Pérez García (Mr.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (5)