The ENP image and ground truth dataset of historical newspapers

This paper presents a research dataset of historical newspapers comprising over 500 page images, uniquely representative of European cultural heritage from the digitization projects of 12 national and major European libraries, created within the scope of the large-scale digitisation Europeana Newspapers Project (ENP). Every image is accompanied by comprehensive ground truth (Unicode encoded full-text, layout information with precise region outlines, type labels, and reading order) in PAGE format and searchable metadata about document characteristics and artefacts. The first part of the paper describes the nature of the dataset, how it was built, and the challenges encountered. In the second part, a baseline for two state-of-the-art OCR systems (ABBYY FineReader Engine 11 and Tesseract 3.03) is given with regard to both text recognition and segmentation/layout analysis performance.