arXiv Computer Vision By Fabio Quattrini, Carmine Zaccagnino, Costanza Bianchi, Silvia Cascianelli, Rita Cucchiara

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

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The paper introduces SCAM, a line-level dataset of digitized Sahidic Coptic ancient manuscripts designed for Handwritten Text Recognition in low-resource settings. SCAM captures realistic challenges such as varied acquisition conditions, ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration, while also presenting linguistic difficulties due to the scarce resources, uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics of Sahidic Coptic. The authors benchmark several state‑of‑the‑art HTR methods, demonstrating the performance gap between modern, well‑resourced scripts and historically grounded, low‑resource scenarios.

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