31–40 of 45 posts
That‘s exactly what https://transkribus.ai/ was built for - works quite well in my experience, mainly transcribing Deutsche Kurrentschrift, c. 1980.
I don't know if it will be significantly different than what Google Translate does, but I would give the major cloud vendors (Google, Amazon, Microsoft and I guess OpenAI/ChatGPT) OCR services a shot. It's pretty simple and cheap to do (like, about a dollar for the whole thing). Last time I compared them, Google's OCR came out ahead, but it's task-dependent so in your case it might be different. General purpose open-…
Does it look like Sütterlin? Are you familiar with it? [] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
Not familiar with it, but it doesn’t look like that. I wish haha
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not familiar with it, but it doesn’t look like that. I wish haha
100 years ago Sütterlin would be pretty likely. If your sample is not Sütterlin I would consider the possibility that it is older.
You probably want to put it in front of an actual person and get them to transcribe it for you. I don't think there's any off the shelf OCR that will work particularly well for it. I have a close family member who is a historian and frequently read and transcribed mid 19th to early 20th century German handwriting for his work. Many historians and archivists in Germany would have the ability to transcribe this for you…
don't assume this is German just because everyone calls it German. There are/were seneral 'low German' dialects. my grandpa never could understand natives when he toured Germany because all he knew was 100 year old German. (based on stories since he died I suspect he would have had little problem understanding Dutch)
You can train Tesseract to recognize Handwriting[1], but the first and most important step would be the preprocessing of your documents. I would recommend to start with a local adaptive thresholding algorithm[2] like Sauvola for binarization. The preprocessing steps would be[3] 1) Binarization 2) Skew Correction 3) Noise Removal 4) Thinning and Skeletonization Probably you are facing "Sütterlin"[4], which differs qui…
My mother in law (and her mother) wrote everything in Sütterlin and I found it rapidly became pretty easy to read, though that also could be because I only encountered it from a small number of hands.
OTOH I find older Handschrift and Fraktur print (we have a bunch of old books in that) basically illegible.
You can train Tesseract to recognize Handwriting[1], but the first and most important step would be the preprocessing of your documents. I would recommend to start with a local adaptive thresholding algorithm[2] like Sauvola for binarization. The preprocessing steps would be[3] 1) Binarization 2) Skew Correction 3) Noise Removal 4) Thinning and Skeletonization Probably you are facing "Sütterlin"[4], which differs qui…
You probably want to put it in front of an actual person and get them to transcribe it for you. I don't think there's any off the shelf OCR that will work particularly well for it. I have a close family member who is a historian and frequently read and transcribed mid 19th to early 20th century German handwriting for his work. Many historians and archivists in Germany would have the ability to transcribe this for you…
Look to the US not Germany. Many immigrant communities stayed with the old German and stript long after Germany had moved on. My dad was in high school when his church switched to English as the last German only menber died. don't assume this is German just because everyone calls it German. There are/were seneral 'low German' dialects. my grandpa never could understand natives when he toured Germany because all he kn…
And yeah, of course it might not be Hochdeutsch. But anyone who can read the script will know pretty quickly if it's Platt, Swiss German, or something else entirely.
You probably want to put it in front of an actual person and get them to transcribe it for you. I don't think there's any off the shelf OCR that will work particularly well for it. I have a close family member who is a historian and frequently read and transcribed mid 19th to early 20th century German handwriting for his work. Many historians and archivists in Germany would have the ability to transcribe this for you…