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In this paper, we establish the first baseline for handwritten stenography recognition, using the novel LION dataset, and investigate the impact of including selected aspects of stenographic theory into the recognition process. We make the LION dataset publicly available with the aim of encouraging future research in handwritten stenography recognition. A state-of-the-art text recognition model is trained to establish a baseline. Stenographic domain knowledge is integrated by transforming the target sequences into representations which approximate diplomatic transcriptions, wherein each symbol in the script is represented by its own character in the transliteration, as opposed to corresponding combinations of characters from the Swedish alphabet. Four such encoding schemes are evaluated and results are further improved by integrating a pre-training scheme, based on synthetic data. The baseline model achieves an average test character error rate (CER) of 29.81% and a word error rate (WER) of 55.14%. Test error rates are reduced significantly ( p < 0.01) by combining stenography-specific target sequence encodings with pre-training and fine-tuning, yielding CERs in the range of 24.5–26% and WERs of 44.8–48.2%. An analysis of selected recognition errors illustrates the challenges that the stenographic writing system poses to text recognition. This work establishes the first baseline for handwritten stenography recognition. Our proposed combination of integrating stenography-specific knowledge, in conjunction with pre-training and fine-tuning on synthetic data, yields considerable improvements. Together with our precursor study on the subject, this is the first work to apply modern handwritten text recognition to stenography. The dataset and our code are publicly available via Zenodo.

Document image processing and handwritten text recognition have been applied to a variety of materials, scripts, and languages, both modern and historic. They are crucial building blocks in the on-going digitisation efforts of archives, where they aid in preserving archival materials and foster knowledge sharing. The latter is especially facilitated by making document contents available to interested readers who may have little to no practice in, for example, reading a specific script type, and might therefore face challenges in accessing the material.The first part of this dissertation focuses on reducing editorial artefacts, specifically in the form of struck-through words, in manuscripts. The main goal of this process is to identify struck-through words and remove as much of the strikethrough artefacts as possible in order to regain access to the original word. This step can serve both as preprocessing, to aid human annotators and readers, as well as in computerised pipelines, such as handwritten text recognition. Two deep learning-based approaches, exploring paired and unpaired data settings, are examined and compared. Furthermore, an approach for generating synthetic strikethrough data, for example, for training and testing purposes, and three novel datasets are presented.The second part of this dissertation is centred around applying handwritten text recognition to the stenographic manuscripts of Swedish children's book author Astrid Lindgren (1907 - 2002). Manually transliterating stenography, also known as shorthand, requires special domain knowledge of the script itself. Therefore, the main focus of this part is to reduce the required manual work, aiming to increase the accessibility of the material. In this regard, a baseline for handwritten text recognition of Swedish stenography is established. Two approaches for improving upon this baseline are examined. Firstly, a variety of data augmentation techniques, commonly-used in handwritten text recognition, are studied. Secondly, different target sequence encoding methods, which aim to approximate diplomatic transcriptions, are investigated. The latter, in combination with a pre-training approach, significantly improves the recognition performance. In addition to the two presented studies, the novel LION dataset is published, consisting of excerpts from Astrid Lindgren's stenographic manuscripts.

Purpose: In this paper, we establish a baseline for handwritten stenography recognition, using the novel LION dataset, and investigate the impact of including selected aspects of stenographic theory into the recognition process. We make the LION dataset publicly available with the aim of encouraging future research in handwritten stenography recognition. Methods: A state-of-the-art text recognition model is trained to establish a baseline. Stenographic domain knowledge is integrated by applying four different encoding methods that transform the target sequence into representations, which approximate selected aspects of the writing system. Results are further improved by integrating a pre-training scheme, based on synthetic data. Results: The baseline model achieves an average test character error rate (CER) of 29.81% and a word error rate (WER) of 55.14%. Test error rates are reduced significantly by combining stenography-specific target sequence encodings with pre-training and fine-tuning, yielding CERs in the range of 24.5% - 26% and WERs of 44.8% - 48.2%. Conclusion: The obtained results demonstrate the challenging nature of stenography recognition. Integrating stenography-specific knowledge, in conjunction with pre-training and fine-tuning on synthetic data, yields considerable improvements. Together with our precursor study on the subject, this is the first work to apply modern handwritten text recognition to stenography. The dataset and our code are publicly available via Zenodo.

One of the factors limiting the performance of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for stenography is the small amount of annotated training data. To alleviate the problem of data scarcity, modern HTR methods often employ data augmentation. However, due to specifics of the stenographic script, such settings may not be directly applicable for stenography recognition. In this work, we study 22 classical augmentation techniques, most of which are commonly used for HTR of other scripts, such as Latin handwriting. Through extensive experiments, we identify a group of augmentations, including for example contained ranges of random rotation, shifts and scaling, that are beneficial to the use case of stenography recognition. Furthermore, a number of augmentation approaches, leading to a decrease in recognition performance, are identified. Our results are supported by statistical hypothesis testing. Links to the publicly available dataset and codebase are provided.

Transcribing struck-through, handwritten words, for example for the purpose of genetic criticism, can pose a challenge to both humans and machines, due to the obstructive properties of the superimposed strokes. This paper investigates the use of paired image to image translation approaches to remove strikethrough strokes from handwritten words. Four different neural network architectures are examined, ranging from a few simple convolutional layers to deeper ones, employing Dense blocks. Experimental results, obtained from one synthetic and one genuine paired strikethrough dataset, confirm that the proposed paired models outperform the CycleGAN-based state of the art, while using less than a sixth of the trainable parameters.