Convolutional Networks for Historic Text Recognition

This thesis deals with text line recognition of historical documents. Historical texts dating back to the 17th - 19th centuries are written in fraktur typeface. The character recognition problem is solved using neural network architecture called sequence-to-sequence . This architecture is based on encoder-decoder model and contains attention mechanism. In this thesis a dataset, from texts originated from German archiv called Deutsches Textarchiv , was created. This archive contains 3 897 different German books that have available transcripts and corresponding images of pages. The created dataset was used to train and experiment with the proposed neural network. During the experiments, several convolutional models, hyperparameters and the effects of positional embedding were investigated. The final tool can recognize characters with accuracy 99,63 %. The contribution of this work is the~mentioned dataset and neural network, which can be used to recognize historical documents