README.md

Line_HTR

gMLP layers and Bidirectional LSTM decoder stacked on a multilayer CNN for image-to-transcription.

This repository is associated with the paper "gMLP guided Deep Networks Model for Character-based Handwritten Text Transcription".

Please cite the paper if you use this code for academic research:

Bensouilah, M., Taffar, M. & Zennir, M.N. gMLP guided deep networks model for character-based handwritten text transcription. Multimed Tools Appl (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-15293-1

Acknowledgements

IAM image and transcription preprocessing from Laia.

Prerequsites

Python 3 (tested on Python 3.7)

Tensorflow 2 (tested on 2.1.0)

Required packages: {editdistance, Levenshtein, openCV 2, pillow, matplotlib, scikit-image}:

pip3 install {package}

Image-to-transcription on IAM:

Data Preparation

Follow steps for IAM data preparation. IAM consists of approx. 10k images of handwritten text lines and their transcriptions. The code in the linked repo binarizes the images in a manner that preserves the original grayscale information, converts to JPEG, and scales to 64 pixel height. The code creates a folder for preprocessed images imgs_proc and transcriptions htr/lang/char.

Create a file train.txt from the transcription tr.txt that replaces whitespace with a vertical pipe and contains the path of images and the corresponding characters, e.g.:

a01-000u-00.jpg A|MOVE|to|stop|Mr.|Gaitskell|from
a01-000u-01.jpg nominating|any|more|Labour|life|Peers
a01-000u-02.jpg is|to|be|made|at|a|meeting|of|Labour

Also create files val.txt and test.txt from htr/lang/word/va.txt and htr/lang/word/te.txt, respectively, following the same format as above.

Assume that the working directory is Line_HTR. The data files within Line_HTR should have the structure:

• data
• iam
  • lines (folder of JPEG images)
  • train.txt
  • lines_val.txt
  • lines_test.txt

Train

python run.py