Handwritten Text Recognition

Description from the archive archive 2025-07-28.

Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28

13 leaderboard tables shown for this task, 13 with rows (a “benchmark” on this site is a table with at least one row, as on /sota), ordered by row count. “Best model” is the first row in the archive's own order at snapshot; nothing is re-ranked here and metric direction is not recorded in the archive. PwC's Trend sparklines are not in the archive, so that column is omitted. 10 shown of 13 until expanded.

Syntology column: samples harvested from the paper's repositories and executed on synthesized fixtures; “ran” is not a correctness claim and does not order the table. A dash means no Syntology record for that paper, not a recorded non-run. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.

Libraries

Not in the archive: the export carries no per-task library table, so there is nothing to show at snapshot 2025-07-28.

Datasets archive 2025-07-28

14 datasets whose archive record lists this task, ordered by the archive's paper count.

Subtasks archive 2025-07-28

2 subtasks in the archive's task tree.

Parent tasks archive 2025-07-28

Most implemented papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 56 papers with code (139 tagged with this task in all), ordered by repositories listed in the archive, not by stars (the archive holds no stars, so PwC's “Social” and “Latest” sorts cannot be reproduced). Papers without a page here are shown as plain text.

• TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models
  21 Sep 2021 8 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 6 samples · 6 unverified
  Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization.
• OrigamiNet: Weakly-Supervised, Segmentation-Free, One-Step, Full Page Text Recognition by learning to unfold
  12 Jun 2020 8 repositories listed
  On IAM we even surpass single line methods that use accurate localization information during training.
• Full Page Handwriting Recognition via Image to Sequence Extraction
  11 Mar 2021 5 repositories listed
  We present a Neural Network based Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model architecture that can be trained to recognize full pages of handwritten or printed text without image segmentation.
• Decoupled Attention Network for Text Recognition
  21 Dec 2019 5 repositories listed
  To remedy this issue, we propose a decoupled attention network (DAN), which decouples the alignment operation from using historical decoding results.
• ScrabbleGAN: Semi-Supervised Varying Length Handwritten Text Generation
  23 Mar 2020 3 repositories listed Syntology ran 2 of 15 samples · 13 unverified
  This is especially true for handwritten text recognition (HTR), where each author has a unique style, unlike printed text, where the variation is smaller by design.
• HTR-VT: Handwritten Text Recognition with Vision Transformer
  13 Sep 2024 2 repositories listed
  To address this limitation, we introduce a data-efficient ViT method that uses only the encoder of the standard transformer.
• Muharaf: Manuscripts of Handwritten Arabic Dataset for Cursive Text Recognition
  13 Jun 2024 2 repositories listed
  We present the Manuscripts of Handwritten Arabic~(Muharaf) dataset, which is a machine learning dataset consisting of more than 1, 600 historic handwritten page images transcribed by experts in archival Arabic.
• Data Generation for Post-OCR correction of Cyrillic handwriting
  27 Nov 2023 2 repositories listed
  We apply a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model to this dataset to identify OCR errors, forming the basis for our POC model training.
• Uncovering the Handwritten Text in the Margins: End-to-end Handwritten Text Detection and Recognition
  10 Mar 2023 2 repositories listed
  The pressing need for digitization of historical documents has led to a strong interest in designing computerised image processing methods for automatic handwritten text recognition.
• Digital Peter: Dataset, Competition and Handwriting Recognition Methods
  16 Mar 2021 2 repositories listed
  This paper presents a new dataset of Peter the Great's manuscripts and describes a segmentation procedure that converts initial images of documents into the lines.
• Sequence-to-Sequence Contrastive Learning for Text Recognition
  20 Dec 2020 2 repositories listed
  We propose a framework for sequence-to-sequence contrastive learning (SeqCLR) of visual representations, which we apply to text recognition.
• Meta-DAN: towards an efficient prediction strategy for page-level handwritten text recognition
  4 Apr 2025 1 repository listed
  Recent advances in text recognition led to a paradigm shift for page-level recognition, from multi-step segmentation-based approaches to end-to-end attention-based ones.
• Judge a Book by its Cover: Investigating Multi-Modal LLMs for Multi-Page Handwritten Document Transcription
  27 Feb 2025 1 repository listed
  Experiments on a multi-page version of the IAM Handwriting Database demonstrate that '+first page' improves transcription accuracy, balances cost with performance, and even enhances results on out-of-sample text by…
• Unlocking the Archives: Using Large Language Models to Transcribe Handwritten Historical Documents
  2 Nov 2024 1 repository listed
  This study demonstrates that Large Language Models (LLMs) can transcribe historical handwritten documents with significantly higher accuracy than specialized Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) software, while being…
• Hespi: A pipeline for automatically detecting information from hebarium specimen sheets
  11 Oct 2024 1 repository listed
  We applied advanced computer vision techniques to develop the `Hespi' (HErbarium Specimen sheet PIpeline), which extracts a pre-catalogue subset of collection data on the institutional labels on herbarium specimens from…
• Platypus: A Generalized Specialist Model for Reading Text in Various Forms
  27 Aug 2024 1 repository listed
  Recently, generalist models (such as GPT-4V), trained on tremendous data in a unified way, have shown enormous potential in reading text in various scenarios, but with the drawbacks of limited accuracy and low…
• DANIEL: A fast Document Attention Network for Information Extraction and Labelling of handwritten documents
  12 Jul 2024 1 repository listed
  Despite this, these integrated approaches have not yet matched the performance of language models, when applied to information extraction in plain text.
• Best Practices for a Handwritten Text Recognition System
  17 Apr 2024 1 repository listed
  Handwritten text recognition has been developed rapidly in the recent years, following the rise of deep learning and its applications.
• Automatic Transcription of Handwritten Old Occitan Language
  6 Dec 2023 1 repository listed
  While existing neural network-based approaches have shown promising results in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for high-resource languages and standardized/machine-written text, their application to low-resource…
• Exploring OCR Capabilities of GPT-4V(ision) : A Quantitative and In-depth Evaluation
  25 Oct 2023 1 repository listed Syntology ran 4 of 4 samples · 0 unverified · 4 pointer-only (licence)
  We assess the model's performance across a range of OCR tasks, including scene text recognition, handwritten text recognition, handwritten mathematical expression recognition, table structure recognition, and…
• DTrOCR: Decoder-only Transformer for Optical Character Recognition
  30 Aug 2023 1 repository listed
  Typical text recognition methods rely on an encoder-decoder structure, in which the encoder extracts features from an image, and the decoder produces recognized text from these features.
• Handwritten Stenography Recognition and the LION Dataset
  15 Aug 2023 1 repository listed
  Methods: A state-of-the-art text recognition model is trained to establish a baseline.
• Writer adaptation for offline text recognition: An exploration of neural network-based methods
  11 Jul 2023 1 repository listed
  In this paper, we explore how HTR models can be made writer adaptive by using only a handful of examples from a new writer (e.
• BN-DRISHTI: Bangla Document Recognition through Instance-level Segmentation of Handwritten Text Images
  31 May 2023 1 repository listed
  Handwriting recognition remains challenging for some of the most spoken languages, like Bangla, due to the complexity of line and word segmentation brought by the curvilinear nature of writing and lack of quality…
• Faster DAN: Multi-target Queries with Document Positional Encoding for End-to-end Handwritten Document Recognition
  25 Jan 2023 1 repository listed
  Recent advances in handwritten text recognition enabled to recognize whole documents in an end-to-end way: the Document Attention Network (DAN) recognizes the characters one after the other through an attention-based…
• End-to-End Page-Level Assessment of Handwritten Text Recognition
  14 Jan 2023 1 repository listed
  The evaluation of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) systems has traditionally used metrics based on the edit distance between HTR and ground truth (GT) transcripts, at both the character and word levels.
• Enhancing Indic Handwritten Text Recognition Using Global Semantic Information
  15 Dec 2022 1 repository listed
  We use a semantic module in an encoder-decoder framework for extracting global semantic information to recognize the Indic handwritten texts.
• Towards End-to-end Handwritten Document Recognition
  30 Sep 2022 1 repository listed
  We proposed an approach at the line level, based on a fully convolutional network, in order to design a first generic feature extraction step for the handwriting recognition task.
• Handwritten Paleographic Greek Text Recognition: A Century-Based Approach
  1 Jun 2022 1 repository listed
  The overall aim of this paper is to assess HTR for old Greek manuscripts.
• Easter2.0: Improving convolutional models for handwritten text recognition
  30 May 2022 1 repository listed
  In addition to the Easter2.

Syntology lines on 3 of the papers shown; no Syntology record for the others (a paper without an arXiv id cannot be joined to the graph, and absence from the graph layer is not a recorded non-run). “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized fixture, not that the paper's result was reproduced. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.