An Intelligent User Interface for Efficient Semi-automatic Transcription of Historical Handwritten Documents

Transcription of large-scale historical handwritten document images is a tedious task. Machine learning techniques, such as deep learning, are popularly used for quick transcription, but often require a substantial amount of pre-transcribed word examples for training. Instead of line-by-line word transcription, this paper proposes a simple training-free gamification strategy where all occurrences of each arbitrarily selected word is transcribed once, using an intelligent user interface implemented in this work. The proposed approach offers a fast and user-friendly semi-automatic transcription that allows multiple users to work on the same document collection simultaneously.