GuWenShiBie

Large-scale digitization projects (Google Book, Europeana, Gallica, British Library...National Library of China) produce every year a great number of scanned images of documents from cultural heritage. The objective of the proposed project is to transcribe historic document image into an editable text in order to allow researchers and experts to edit, translate, search and browse their contents. It will focus recognition methods for historical Chinese manuscripts in International Dunhuang Project (IDP) with a cross-cultural communication background. This project addresses the challenges to current OCR research, including degraded image quality, various layout and styles, and large character set with less learning samples. The proposed research plan by two partners LIRIS and TSINGHUA attacks the problems of robust processing and recognition. The final system's performance is evaluated by standard database and evaluation tools. The project makes meaningful exploration to the historical Chinese manuscripts recognition. The estimated research achievements will be useful to historical document in other scripts, as both partners has research experience on multilingual document analysis and recognition.