V4ldeLund/Faroese-Handwritten-OCR

Faroese Handwritten OCR

Public draft, version 0.1: an alignment pilot with 16 line-image/text pairs from one historical Faroese manuscript page. No rows are verified benchmark ground truth.

The page is image 3 of D IV – Ániasar táttur, held by Landsbókasavnið (National Library of the Faroe Islands) and digitized on HandRit. The manuscript is associated with the scribe Jóhan Hendrik Schrøter (1842–1911). Proposed reference text is aligned from Eivind Weyhe's scholarly edition of this same manuscript, printed p. 105 / PDF p. 15.

Inspect the alignment

• Browse all 16 crops with their proposed text.
• Original manuscript page.
• Page with region overlays.
• Download the self-contained interactive review and open the downloaded HTML in a browser.

The corrected line 15 crop:

Proposed edition-derived text: Aanias han four sâr.

Scope and current quality

Property	Value
Language	Historical Faroese; Suðuroy dialect
Source pages	1
Image/text records	16
Split	pilot
Verified gold records	0
Benchmark-eligible records	0
Geometry	Lines 15–16 have visually checked polygon masks; other 14 rows are draft context rectangles
Reference review	Every row still needs expert review

Coverage: stanza 1, the refrain, stanzas 2–3, and the first two lines of stanza 4. The title and standalone stanza numerals are omitted. Stanza 4 continues on the next manuscript image, which is not included. This is not a complete page transcription and does not represent modern Faroese handwriting or multiple writers.

Preparation and provenance

An AI assistant visually matched manuscript regions to the published stanza/line sequence. The paired text comes from the scholarly edition; it was not generated by one of the OCR models being benchmarked. This is assistant-prepared alignment, not an independent expert verification of each handwritten character.

The edition and the visible handwriting are not identical. Capitalization, punctuation, accent conventions, supplied text and corrections require reconciliation. The refrain was reflowed to the manuscript's two physical lines. Extracted modifier-circumflex notation such as aˆa and sæˆr remains provisional. Row-specific notes identify known issues. Do not silently treat text as gold.

The original image is preserved. Crops 1–14 are rectangular context crops and may contain neighboring ink. Crops 15–16 use recorded source-coordinate polygons: pixels inside the polygon are unchanged; pixels outside are filled white. The previous line-15 rectangle included line 16 and was replaced after review. All cropping, masks, proposed alignments and corrections in this dataset are the dataset preparer's work, not changes made or endorsed by HandRit or the editor.

Files and fields

• data/pilot.parquet: self-contained image bytes and annotation fields, with Hugging Face image feature metadata.
• alignment.jsonl: source image/crop paths, proposed references, coordinates, provenance, hashes, statuses and notes.
• page.json: page-level coverage, exclusions and limitations.
• images/, crops/: original manuscript image and PNG crops.
• review.html, ALIGNMENT.md, page-overlay.png: review materials.
• SHA256SUMS.json: package integrity hashes.

Important dataset fields include image, text, reference_text, id, page_id, reading_order, bbox_xywh, polygon_xy, crop_method, geometry_status, review_status, benchmark_eligible, review_notes, source_url, source_image_sha256 and the nested edition citation. bbox_xywh is [x, y, width, height] in the original 777 × 1280 pixel image. polygon_xy uses the same coordinate system and is null for rectangular crops.

Load

from datasets import load_dataset

dataset = load_dataset(
    "V4ldeLund/Faroese-Handwritten-OCR",
    split="pilot",
)
image = dataset[14]["image"]
proposed_text = dataset[14]["text"]
assert not dataset[14]["benchmark_eligible"]

The split is called pilot; no train/test separation is claimed. Review the geometry and transcription rules, confirm the references, and version a frozen evaluation subset before reporting OCR accuracy.

Sources and reuse status

• HandRit: D IV – Ániasar táttur.
• HandRit attribution and reuse guidance.
• Weyhe, Eivind. Ániasartáttur – ein uppskrift á suðuroyarmáli / Ániasartáttur – a variant in Suðuroy dialect. Fróðskaparrit 61 (2014), pp. 91–115. Article and DOI; PDF. The journal landing page gives online publication as 19 July 2015.

No blanket open license is asserted for this collection. HandRit publishes guidance for public-domain material, attribution and disclosed modifications; the item-specific image terms and reuse of the scholarly transcription have not been fully established. This draft does not grant rights to third-party source material. The full journal PDF is not included.