Abstract
This work presents a pipeline for processing digitally scanned documents, reading their textual content, and storing it in a dataset for the purpose of information retrieval. The pipeline is able to handle images of various quality, whether they were obtained by a digital scanner or camera. The image can contain multiple pages in any layout, but an approximate upright orientation is assumed. The pipeline uses Faster R-CNN to detect individual pages. These are then processed by a deskew algorithm to correct the orientation, and finally read by the Tesseract OCR system that has been retrained on a large set of synthetic images and a small set of annotated real-world documents. By applying the pipeline, we were able to increase the word recall to 60.56% which is an absolute gain of 19.19% from the baseline solution that uses only Tesseract OCR. A demo of the proposed pipeline can be found at https://archivkgb.zcu.cz/.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic, project No. DG20P02OVV018. Access to computing and storage facilities owned by parties and projects contributing to the National Grid Infrastructure MetaCentrum provided under the programme “Projects of Large Research, Development, and Innovations Infrastructures” (CESNET LM2015042), is greatly appreciated.
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Gruber, I. et al. (2021). OCR Improvements for Images of Multi-page Historical Documents. In: Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12997. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87802-3_21
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