Automatic assessment of OCR quality in historical documents

Anshul Gupta, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna, Matthew Christy, Boris Capitanu, Loretta Auvil, Liz Grumbach, Richard Furuta, Laura Mandell

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Mass digitization of historical documents is a challenging problem for optical character recognition (OCR) tools. Issues include noisy backgrounds and faded text due to aging, border/marginal noise, bleed-through, skewing, warping, as well as irregular fonts and page layouts. As a result, OCR tools often produce a large number of spurious bounding boxes (BBs) in addition to those that correspond to words in the document. This paper presents an iterative classification algorithm to automatically label BBs (i.e., as text or noise) based on their spatial distribution and geometry. The approach uses a rule-base classifier to generate initial text/noise labels for each BB, followed by an iterative classifier that refines the initial labels by incorporating local information to each BB, its spatial location, shape and size. When evaluated on a dataset containing over 72,000 manually-labeled BBs from 159 historical documents, the algorithm can classify BBs with 0.95 precision and 0.96 recall. Further evaluation on a collection of 6,775 documents with ground-truth transcriptions shows that the algorithm can also be used to predict document quality (0.7 correlation) and improve OCR transcriptions in 85% of the cases.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2015 and the 27th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2015
PublisherAI Access Foundation
Pages1735-1741
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781577357018
StatePublished - Jun 1 2015
Event29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2015 and the 27th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2015 - Austin, United States
Duration: Jan 25 2015Jan 30 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume3

Other

Other29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2015 and the 27th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAustin
Period1/25/151/30/15

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Artificial Intelligence

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