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 Computer Vision
Sep 1

Automated pipeline for herbarium label digitization

HERBIOME is a modular, end‑to‑end pipeline that automates the digitization of herbarium labels. It combines YOLOv8 for component detection, CRAFT Hezar for word‑level text localization, a fine‑tuned TrOCR model for mixed handwritten and printed text recognition, and GPT‑4o Mini for structuring metadata into standardized fields. Evaluation on 450 French specimens shows high surface similarity (MWS ≈ 0.616) and moderate semantic accuracy (SMA ≈ 0.442), with taxonomic fields identified as the main challenge.

By Hiba Abbad, Hanane Ariouat, Eva Perez Pimpare, Nicolas Turenne, Eric Chenin, Abderrazak Sebaa, Edi Prifti, Jean-Daniel Zucker, Youcef Sklab
arXiv AI
2d ago

PyPottery: an AI-powered end-to-end suite for pottery processing and publication

PyPottery is an open‑source, AI‑powered suite that semi‑automates the entire ceramic documentation pipeline, comprising four modules: PyPotteryScan for image extraction and handwriting recognition, PyPotteryInk for automatic inking of pencil drawings, PyPotteryTrace for semantically‑aware vectorization, and PyPotteryLayout for automated layout generation. In a study of 50 hand‑drawn sheets with 240 pottery drawings from the Terramara di Montale in Italy, users reported a median perceived speedup of 40× compared to traditional workflows, with a range from 17.5× to 120×. The results demonstrate significant time savings and suggest that AI can shift cognitive labor toward augmentation rather than full automation.

By Lorenzo Cardarelli
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