This paper presents a framework for semi-automatic transcription of large-scale historical handwritten documents and proposes a simple user-friendly text extractor tool, TexT for transcription. The proposed approach provides a quick and easy transcription of text using computer assisted interactive technique. The algorithm finds multiple occurrences of the marked text on-the-fly using a word spotting system. TexT is also capable of performing on-the-fly annotation of handwritten text with automatic generation of ground truth labels, and dynamic adjustment and correction of user generated bounding box annotations with the word being perfectly encapsulated. The user can view the document and the found words in the original form or with background noise removed for easier visualization of transcription results. The effectiveness of TexT is demonstrated on an archival manuscript collection from well-known publicly available dataset.
@cite_5: Active learning strategies are being increasingly used in a variety of real-world tasks, though their application to handwritten text transcription in old manuscripts remains nearly unexplored. The basic idea is to follow a sequential, line-byline transcription of the whole manuscript in which a continuously retrained system interacts with the user to efficiently transcribe each new line. This approach has been recently explored using a conventional strategy by which the user is only asked to supervise words that are not recognized with high confidence. In this paper, the conventional strategy is improved by also letting the system to recompute most probable hypotheses with the constraints imposed by user supervisions. In particular, two strategies are studied which differ in the frequency of hypothesis recomputation on the current line: after each (iterative) or all (delayed) user corrections. Empirical results are reported on two real tasks showing that these strategies outperform the conventional approach.
An active learning based handwritten text transcription method is proposed in @cite_5 that performs a sequential line-by-line transcription of the document, and a continuously re-trained system interacts with the end-user to efficiently transcribe each line.