The paper evaluates whether incorporating the hierarchical structure of Tironian notes can improve automatic recognition of this complex Latin shorthand system. Experiments compare flat classifiers (ResNet18, ConvNeXt, Swin, ViT) with hierarchy‑aware models (HD‑CNN and routing approaches) on handwritten and manuscript samples, with and without few‑shot adaptation. Results show that hierarchical models outperform flat ones when no adaptation is applied, but flat models surpass them after few‑shot adaptation, indicating that hierarchy can aid recognition under non‑adapted conditions.
arXiv:2606. 24984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning representations that remain robust across centuries of variation in handwriting is a key challenge in diachronic representation learning.
arXiv:2606. 07558v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Purpose: Digitization projects in the humanities produce vast, heterogeneous archives of historical documents, making manual sorting impractical at scale.
The paper introduces a Hybrid Deep Learning (HDL) architecture that combines Auto-Learned Features (ALF) and Human-Engineered Features (HEF) for handwriting verification. ALF is extracted using a Two Channel Convolutional Neural Network (TC-CNN) or a Two Channel Autoencoder (TC-AE), while HEF is obtained via Gradient Structural Concavity (GSC) or Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). Experiments on 150,000 pairs of the word "AND" from 1,500 writers show that the HDL model using AE-GSC achieves 99.7% accuracy on a seen writer dataset and 92.16% on a shuffled writer dataset, outperforming CEDAR-FOX, and AE-SIFT performs comparably on unseen writers.
ExpertHTR is a unified vision‑language framework for handwritten text recognition that tackles the challenge of small, heterogeneous datasets by organizing structural annotations into a common Page‑Region‑Line representation. It defines four related training tasks—complete transcription, physical‑line coverage, text localization, and localized recognition—without extra manual labels. The model combines a jointly trained dense backbone with a sparse Mixture‑of‑Experts architecture, using Sparsegen routing and regularization to adaptively activate experts, achieving state‑of‑the‑art results on the IAM benchmark and outperforming general‑purpose OCR systems on most datasets.
arXiv:2604. 00725v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts.
arXiv:2609.10084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) has emerged as an important paradigm for visual recognition systems that must generalize to classes that were n...
MEVL-STP introduces a two‑stage pipeline for spotting arbitrarily shaped scene text. The detection stage fuses features from six frozen vision encoders via a hierarchical Feature Pyramid Network and a Progressive Scale Expansion network to produce precise polygon masks. The recognition stage then crops these masks and feeds them to a fine‑tuned Qwen3‑VL‑8B‑Instruct model, achieving state‑of‑the‑art detection and end‑to‑end performance on CTW1500, Total‑Text, and ICDAR 2015 without synthetic pretraining.
The study adapts a convolutional neural network to classify galaxy morphologies using crowd-sourced annotations from Galaxy Zoo 1. It evaluates how training strategies—such as training all layers versus only the last, incorporating hierarchical labels, varying data volume and annotator agreement, staged transfer learning, and ensembling—affect accuracy and efficiency. Results show that full-network training and high annotator agreement yield over 99% accuracy, while hierarchical approaches and staged learning help when data are limited.
arXiv:2609.37195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems have become an indispensable tool for the digitization of historical documents. Not only do they cut down ti...
The paper introduces GraphemeNet, a unified multi‑script handwritten character recognition architecture that explicitly encodes script‑geometric regularities. It uses two orthogonal binary axes: Persistent Scaffold Injection (PSI) to embed stroke‑level geometry into each encoder stage, and a choice between gated global pooling or a Stroke Topology Module for spatial relational reasoning. Across fourteen benchmarks in eight writing systems, GraphemeNet achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance with fewer parameters, demonstrating the effectiveness of structural‑prior efficiency for multi‑script HCR.
The paper adapts the compact PP‑OCRv6 recognizer for historical text recognition and compares it to a conventional CRNN across various training regimes, including generalized pretraining, domain‑specific training, corpus‑level fine‑tuning, and manuscript‑specific few‑shot adaptation on multilingual Latin and Arabic scripts. While PP‑OCRv6 does not always beat the CRNN when trained from scratch, heterogeneous pretraining significantly improves its generalization. Additionally, fine‑tuned PP‑OCRv6 can surpass a large vision‑language model (Qwen3.5‑based Medusa) that is specifically tailored for historical Latin‑script handwriting recognition.
arXiv:2607. 04262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) for image classification exploit a dense grid of pixels containing redundant information.