Loghi is a set of tools for Handwritten Text Recognition.

Two sample scripts are provided to make starting everything a little bit easier. na-pipeline.sh: for transcribing scans na-pipeline-train.sh: for training new models.

Install Loghi so that you can use its pipeline script.

git clone [email protected]:knaw-huc/loghi.git
cd loghi

The easiest method to run Loghi is to use the default dockers images on Docker Hub. The docker images are usually pulled automatically when running na-pipeline.sh mentioned later in this document, but you can pull them separately with the following commands:

docker pull loghi/docker.laypa
docker pull loghi/docker.htr
docker pull loghi/docker.loghi-tooling

If you do not have Docker installed follow these instructions to install it on your local machine.

If you instead want to build the dockers yourself with the latest code:

git submodule update --init --recursive
cd docker
./buildAll.sh

This also allows you to have a look at the source code inside the dockers. The source code is available in the submodules.

But first go to: https://surfdrive.surf.nl/files/index.php/s/YA8HJuukIUKznSP and download a laypa model (for detection of baselines) and a loghi-htr model (for HTR).

suggestion for laypa:

• general

suggestion for loghi-htr that should give some results:

• generic-2023-02-15

It is not perfect, but a good starting point. It should work ok on 17th and 18th century handwritten dutch. For best results always finetune on your own specific data.

edit the na-pipeline.sh using vi, nano, other whatever editor you prefer. We'll use nano in this example

nano na-pipeline.sh

Look for the following lines:

LAYPAMODEL=INSERT_FULL_PATH_TO_YAML_HERE
LAYPAMODELWEIGHTS=INSERT_FULLPATH_TO_PTH_HERE
HTRLOGHIMODEL=INSERT_FULL_PATH_TO_LOGHI_HTR_MODEL_HERE

and update those paths with the location of the files you just downloaded. If you downloaded a zip: you should unzip it first.

if you do not have a NVIDIA-GPU and nvidia-docker setup additionally change

GPU=0

to

GPU=-1

It will then run on CPU, which will be very slow. If you are using the pretrained model and run on CPU: please make sure to download the Loghi-htr model starting with "float32-". This will run faster on CPU than the default mixed_float16 models.

Save the file and run it:

./na-pipeline.sh /PATH_TO_FOLDER_CONTAINING_IMAGES

replace /PATH_TO_FOLDER_CONTAINING_IMAGES with a valid directory containing images (.jpg is preferred/tested) directly below it.

The file should run for a short while if you have a good nvidia GPU and nvidia-docker setup. It might be a long while if you just have CPU available. It should work either way, just a lot slower on CPU.

When it finishes without errors a new folder called "page" should be created in the directory with the images. This contains the PageXML output.

Expected structure

training_data_folder
|- training_all_train.txt
|- training_all_val.txt
|- image1_snippets
    |-snippet1.png
    |-snippet2.png

training_all_train.txt should look something something like:

/path/to/training_data_folder/image1_snippets/snippet1.png	textual representation of snippet 1
/path/to/training_data_folder/image1_snippets//snippet2.png text on snippet 2

n.b. path to image and textual representation should be separated by a tab.

You can create training data with the following command:

./create_train_data.sh /full/path/to/input /full/path/to/output

/full/path/to/output is /full/path/to/training_data_folder in this example /full/path/to/input is expected to look like:

input
|- image1.png
|- image2.png
|- page
    |- image1.xml
    |- image2.xml

page/image1.xml should contain information about the baselines and should have the textual representation of the text lines.

Edit the na-pipeline-train.sh script using your favorite editor:

nano na-pipeline-train.sh

Find the following lines:

listdir=INSERT_FULL_PATH_TO_TRAINING_DATA_FOLDER
trainlist=INSERT_FULL_PATH_TO_TRAINING_DATA_LIST
validationlist=INSERT_FULL_PATH_TO_VALIDATION_DATA_LIST

In this example:

listdir=/full/path/to/training_data_folder
trainlist=/full/path/to/training_data_folder/train_list.txt
validationlist=/full/path/to/training_data_folder/val_list.txt

if you do not have a NVIDIA-GPU and nvidia-docker setup additionally change:

GPU=0

to

GPU=-1

It will then run on CPU, which will be very slow.

Finally, to run the HTR training run the script:

./na-pipeline-train.sh

To update the submodules to the head of their branch (the latest/possibly unstable version) run the following command:

git submodule update --recursive --remote