Browsing by Author "Albertin, Fauzia"

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    An Open-Source Workflow for Handwritten Character Recognition
    (The Eurographics Association, 2025) Imboden, Silvano; Guidazzoli, Antonella; Cardano, Giorgia; Mattei, Luca; Andrucci, Federico; Shemek, Deanna; Pansini, Rossella; Albertin, Fauzia; Liguori, Maria Chiara; Campana, Stefano; Ferdani, Daniele; Graf, Holger; Guidi, Gabriele; Hegarty, Zackary; Pescarin, Sofia; Remondino, Fabio
    The rich manuscript heritage of Italy, preserved in archives and libraries, is becoming increasingly accessible to a wider audience through dedicated digitization initiatives. However, the interpretation of these manuscripts often proves challenging due to several factors: the linguistic complexity of medieval Latin, the early development of vernacular languages, the continuous evolution of handwriting styles, and the extensive use of abbreviation systems devised to conserve space on costly materials such as parchment and paper. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can significantly boost the last step of the digitization process: the transcription. In particular, the advent of the Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR) technology enables recognition and processing of handwritten text. However, as with all AI tools - especially in the domain of handwritten texts and, more broadly, in the Humanities, training and fine-tuning is required. To support Digital Humanists in tailoring these powerful tools to specific needs - i.e. transcribing different handwriting styles - a Human-AI collaboration approach has been adopted to develop a collaborative web application, named HCR WORKFLOW, designed for the creation of ground-truth data for AI-based manuscript transcription. The platform is composed by a toolkit for document layout analysis based on Neural Networks for text line recognition (P2PaLA), an image Transformer encoder and an autoregressive text Transformer decoder for single-line transcription (TrOCR). This integrated system guides and assists Digital Humanists throughout the entire process - from digitization to transcription supervision. For this study, the platform was used to fine-tune TrOCR on the humanistic script, and in particular to create the ground truth basing on the Copialettere (Letterbooks) of Isabella d'Este and the letters of Lucrezia Borgia. This research paper will discuss in detail the HCR WORKFLOW platform,the dataset used, the approach to create a AI-oriented transcription, and the results of the fine-tuning of the AI tool for manuscript transcription.