Apply Text Recognition to your documents to automatically transcribe them
Previous step: Uploading files
To automatically transcribe your documents, you need first to select the pages or documents you want to transcribe. Then, click on “Text Recognition” on the left-side menu, under “Tools.”
Now choose the most appropriate text model for your documents.
A text model is the AI algorithm trained on a certain number of data (images and transcriptions), able to detect the most probable sequence of characters for each segmented text line. There does not exist a general model for all the handwritings, so you need to choose the most appropriate one for the script and language of your documents.
Within Transkribus, you can select both the public models made available by the Transkribus community and team and the private models trained by yourself. You can filter your search by language, name, type of documents…
Two additional options that you can select before launching the Text Recognition are:
Smart Search
enables to perform a more advanced and powerful type of search of the automatically generated transcriptions. Read more about it on the Smart Search page.
Language Model
is created automatically during the model training, and it is based on the Training Data. The effect of language models needs to be tested in the individual case: in many cases, they are able to improve the recognition, but so far, there are also cases where they don’t.
After having selected the model and any options, click the “Start” button to launch the recognition. You can check the status of the text recognition by clicking on “Jobs.” When the recognition is finished, open a recognised page: the automatically generated transcript will appear on the right side of the screen.
When you launch the Text Recognition, first, the images are automatically segmented into text regions and lines. This step, called Layout Recognition, connects the text and the image. If your documents have a complex layout (e.g. tables, newspapers, postcards, marginalia, multiple columns…), it could be convenient to run the Layout Recognition as a separate step in order to check and correct it before the Text Recognition. If this is your case, take a look at the Layout Recognition section.
The following sections discuss in more detail the main aspects of Text Recognition and how to choose the best model for your documents.
Next section: Choosing a Model
Transkribus eXpert (deprecated)
To automatically transcribe your documents, go to the “Tools” tab, under the “Text Recognition” section and click on the “Run” button. In the pop-up window, choose the page(s)/document(s) to process and then click on “Select HTR model.” Here you can choose the most appropriate text model for your documents.
A text model is the AI algorithm trained on a certain number of data (images and transcriptions), able to detect the most probable sequence of characters for each segmented text line. There does not exist a general model for all the handwritings, so you need to choose the most appropriate one for the script and language of your documents.
You can select both the public models made available by the Transkribus community and team and the private models trained by yourself. You can filter your search by engine, language and name.
Advanced settings you can select are:
- Use existing line polygons: use this option if you have corrected the line polygons manually because the computation of polygons from the baselines did not perform well on your documents.
- Do polygons simplifaction: to reduce the number of points of the line polygons.
- Add estimated word coordinates: add approximate bounding boxes for each word in the line (you can then decide to show/hide the word boxes with the eye-icon in the Main bar at the top).
- Restrict on structure tag: limit the Text Recognition only to the text regions tagged with the selected structural tag. You can decide if you want to keep or delete the text in the other regions.
After having selected the model, click "OK" to launch the recognition. You can check the status of the text recognition by clicking on the “Jobs” button in the top Main Bar. When the recognition is finished, reload the page: the automatically generated transcript will appear in the text editor,
When you launch the Text Recognition, first, the images are automatically segmented into text regions and lines. This step, called Layout Recognition, connects the text and the image. If your documents have a complex layout (e.g. tables, newspapers, postcards, marginalia, multiple columns…), it could be convenient to run the Layout Recognition as a separate step in order to check and correct it before the Text Recognition. If this is your case, take a look at this page.