Europeana Newspapers OCR Workflow Evaluation

This paper summarises the final performance evaluation results of the OCR workflow which was employed for large-scale production in the Europeana Newspapers project. It gives a detailed overview of how the involved software performed on a representative dataset of historical newspaper pages (for which ground truth was created) with regard to general text accuracy as well as layout-related factors which have an impact on how the material can be used in specific use scenarios. Specific types of errors are examined and evaluated in order to identify possible improvements related to the employed document image analysis and recognition methods. Moreover, alternatives to the standard production workflow are assessed to determine future directions and give advice on best practice related to OCR projects.

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