Fanny loves Wilhelm. HTR Model trained on letters and notes by Fanny Mendelssohn (Fanny Hensel)

Overview

This handwriting recognition model has been fine-tuned using the HTR model for German manuscripts trained from several datasets as base model in eScriptoirum. The ground-truth dataset for the transcriptions is available here.

The model fine-tunes a generic model for german handwriting for the recognition of a single hand (that of Fanny Mendelssohn) and a particularly difficult medium (letters and notes written without much attention to form and sometimes slightly damaged). It achieves significantly better results on test-pages than the base model.

Future Work

Currently, this model works well on test data from the dataset of letters and notes by Fanny Mendelssohn to Wilhelm Hensel. In order to train a model that works well on Fanny Mendelssohn's hand more generally, more and diverse samples of her handwriting should be added to the training set.