Automatic estimation of age distributions from the first Ottoman Empire population register series by using deep learning

Abstract

Recently, an increasing number of studies have applied deep learning algorithms for extracting information from handwritten historical documents. In order to accomplish that, documents must be divided into smaller parts. Page and line segmentation are vital stages in the Handwritten Text Recognition systems; it directly affects the character segmentation stage, which in turn deter-mines the recognition success. In this study, we first applied deep learning-based layout analysis techniques to detect individuals in the first Ottoman population register series collected between the 1840s and the 1860s. Then, we employed horizontal projection profile-based line segmentation to the demographic information of these detected individuals in these registers. We further trained a CNN model to recognize automatically detected ages of individuals and estimated age distributions of people from these historical documents. Extracting age information from these historical registers is significant because it has enormous potential to revolutionize historical demography of around 20 successor states of the Ottoman Empire or countries of today. We achieved approximately 60% digit accuracy for recognizing the numbers in these registers and estimated the age distribution with Root Mean Square Error 23.61.