caveman273/aida-ship-info
Handwritten OCR training data from AIDA-project (Ship Registry) Dataset Summary This dataset contains handwritten textline images and their transcriptions from the AIDA-project. It is a subset of the full AIDA dataset, containing only the best-quality handwritten annotations from ship registry records — lines where the annotator was confident about every character. The majority of lines are in Finnish, with some Swedish, English, French, and German.… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/caveman273/aida-ship-info.
Handwritten OCR training data from AIDA-project (Ship Registry)
Dataset Summary
This dataset contains handwritten textline images and their transcriptions from the AIDA-project. It is a subset of the full AIDA dataset, containing only the best-quality handwritten annotations from ship registry records — lines where the annotator was confident about every character. The majority of lines are in Finnish, with some Swedish, English, French, and German.
Supported Tasks
The dataset was created for handwritten text recognition (HTR).
Languages
The majority of the textlines are in Finnish, but some are in Swedish and English. In addition to this there are few French and German textlines.
Dataset structure
Data Instances
Each row contains:
image: the textline image (PNG bytes + filename)text: the transcriptionfile_name: the original image filename
Data Fields
Data Splits
This dataset contains only the "best" handwritten annotations (every character understood by the annotator). The number in parentheses shows the additional "semi" lines (some characters unclear) not included here.
Dataset Creation
Source Data
The data is collected from Central Archives for Finnish Business (ELKA). It consists exclusively of ship registry records, documenting vessels registered in Finland.
Who are the source language producers?
The source texts were produced by clerks and officials responsible for maintaining ship registry records at Finnish maritime authorities and archives.
Annotations
The textlines were first cropped out of the original image and then transcribed. If the transcription was unclear, the annotator marked it as either "somewhat unclear" or "unclear". Unclear images were discarded, but the "somewhat discarded" images are presented here as in the "semi" annotation files. The rough estimate for "somewhat unclear" class is that less than 100% and more than 50% of the characters are unclear.
Who are the annotators?
Annotators were employees of National Archives of Finland and ELKA.
Synthetic data
As a way to increase the amount of training data, we created synthetic data by using this library https://github.com/Belval/TextRecognitionDataGenerator. We collected Finnish books from https://www.gutenberg.org/ and Finnish magazines from https://archive.org/ and created different kinds of textlines. The different kinds include normal textlines, rotated textlines, textlines following a sinosoidal curve and textlines where characters are subjected to noise.
Personal and Sensitive Information
The dataset is not anonymized, so individuals' names can be found in the dataset.