January 21, 2023 Dataset Open Access

Dataset of Words in Palm-leaf Manuscripts (WPM)

Hussein Mohammed; Giovanni Ciotti

A dataset of words from colophons found in palm-leaf manuscripts hailing from Tamil Nadu has been created for the task of pattern detection from images provided by Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) for the manuscripts belonging to the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek (SUB) Hamburg, and images provided by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the library of the École française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO) in Pondicherry and the Cambridge University Library for their manuscript collections. All images and patterns are selected and annotated by Giovanni Ciotti from the CSMC within the scope of the activities of the Palm-Leaf Manuscript Profiling Initiative (PLMPI). A total of 10 words have been selected and annotated in 69 images.

The dataset has been split into three sub-sets (train, validation, test) in order to follow the standard procedure followed by modern deep-learning models. Furthermore, each image has one corresponding ".xml" file containing the annotation information of words in that image using the Pascal Voc format.

The research for this work was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 ‘Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.