DIVA-HisDB: A precisely annotated large dataset of challenging medieval manuscripts

DIVA-HisDB is a precisely annotated large dataset of challenging medieval manuscripts for the evaluation of several Document Image Analysis (DIA) tasks such as layout analysis, text line segmentation, binarization and writer identification. The database consists of 150 annotated pages of three different medieval manuscripts with challenging layouts.

DIVA-HisDB is a collection of three medieval manuscripts that have been chosen regarding the complexity of their layout, together with partners from e-codices and the Humanities faculty in the University of Fribourg:

1. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 18, codicological unit 4 (CSG18)
2. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 863 (CSG863)
3. Cologny-Geneve, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 55 (CB55)

The dataset was created as part of the HisDocIII project and published for the ICDAR2017 Competition on Layout Analysis for Challenging Medieval Manuscripts.

References

F. Simistira et al.,"Diva-hisdb: A precisely annotated large dataset of challenging medieval manuscripts." 2016 15th International conference on frontiers in handwriting recognition (ICFHR). IEEE, 2016, doi: 10.1109/ICFHR.2016.0093

F. Simistira et al., "ICDAR2017 Competition on Layout Analysis for Challenging Medieval Manuscripts," 2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), Kyoto, Japan, 2017, pp. 1361-1370, doi: 10.1109/ICDAR.2017.223.