PT Unknown
AU D. Perez
   L. Tarazon
   N. Serrano
   F.M. Castro
   Oriol Ramos Terrades
   A. Juan
TI The GERMANA Database
BT 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
PY 2009
BP 301
EP 305
DI 10.1109/ICDAR.2009.10
AB A new handwritten text database, GERMANA, is presented to facilitate empirical comparison of different approaches to text line extraction and off-line handwriting recognition. GERMANA is the result of digitising and annotating a 764-page Spanish manuscript from 1891, in which most pages only contain nearly calligraphed text written on ruled sheets of well-separated lines. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available database for handwriting research, mostly written in Spanish and comparable in size to standard databases. Due to its sequential book structure, it is also well-suited for realistic assessment of interactive handwriting recognition systems. To provide baseline results for reference in future studies, empirical results are also reported, using standard techniques and tools for preprocessing, feature extraction, HMM-based image modelling, and language modelling.
ER