Text detection and recognition by using CNNs in the Austro-Hungarian historical military mapping survey

Abstract

Historical maps include precious data about historical, geographical and economic perspectives of a period. However, several unique challenges and opportunities accompany historical maps compared to modern maps, such as low-quality images, degraded manuscripts and the huge quantity of non-annotated digital map collections. In the recent decade, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are applied to solve various image processing problems, but they need enormous annotated data to have accurate results. In this work, we annotated text regions of the Third Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary historical map series conducted between 1884 and 1918 manually and made them accessible for researchers. Then, we detected the pixel-wise positions of text regions by employing the deep neural network architecture and recognized them with encouraging error rates.