arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Ancient-Bench: A Comprehensive Multi-millennial, Multi-medium, and Multi-script Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Artifact Text Recognition

Ancient-Bench is a new benchmark for recognizing text on ancient Chinese artifacts, comprising 2,700 images that span 3,000 years of character evolution, nine artifact categories, and seven historical script forms. It introduces three annotation standards—symbol, character, and parsing standardization—to accommodate medium‑specific characteristics and enable consistent evaluation. Experiments show that current Vision‑Language Models and OCR specialists still struggle with variant characters, specialized symbols, and hallucination, indicating the task remains largely unsolved.

By Hiuyi Cheng, Nuo Xu, Yuyi Zhang, Xuhan Zheng, Wei Pan, Jing Zhang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Yihua Teng, Jihao Wu, Haoyu Ren, Lianwen Jin
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline reduces human annotation effort and improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages. The authors apply this method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the pipeline against leading multimodal large language models.

By Kartik Chincholikar, Kaushik Gopalan, Mihir Hasabnis
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages, reducing the need for costly human annotation. The authors apply the method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the results against leading multimodal large language models.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

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.

By Fabio Quattrini, Carmine Zaccagnino, Costanza Bianchi, Silvia Cascianelli, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR Framework for Chinese Historical Documents

arXiv:2608. 07917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.

By Zhongheng Zhou, Yi Sun, Huiguo He, Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Yulin Fang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Lianwen Jin