+ Handwritten Text Recognition success with Italian documents from Archivio Storico Ricordi

The Archivio Storico Ricordi is one of the most important private music collections in the world and it has started to work with Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to process some of its treasures.  Founded in Milan in 1808, the Casa Ricordi publishing house contains a wealth of letters and scores from noted composers like Verdi and Puccini.

The archive submitted around 88,000 words of transcribed material written by Giulio Ricordi, the general manger of the publishing house in the late nineteenth century.  This training data was used to generate a model that can produce automatic transcriptions of pages with an impressive Character Error Rate (CER) of 12.3%.

Our example document shows the results on a sample page from the collection – take a look to see how much the computer gets right!