June 8, 2025 Dataset Open Access

Computational Visual Catalogue (CVC) - Rilke's notebooks - Minimal Example

Hussein Mohammed; Quang-Vinh Dang

This small test set consists of 30 images and one JSON file. The images are a few notebook pages from Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA), A:Rilke-Archiv Gernsbach. The JSON file was computationally generated using several AI models and contains information automatically extracted from the images about various visual properties of text, such as word location, colour, orientation, and writing implement.

What’s new in this version:

• The annotations in this JSON file are generated using our enhanced models for improved accuracy in word detection, colour recognition, writing implement recognition, and orientation classification.

The structure of the JSON file is as follows:

Root (object)
├─ info (object)
│   ├─ description   : string
│   ├─ contributor   : string
│   ├─ version       : string
│   ├─ year          : integer
│   └─ date_created  : string    # "YYYY-MM-DD"
│
├─ images (array of object)
│   └─ [image] (object)
│       ├─ id        : integer
│       ├─ file_name : string
│       ├─ width     : integer
│       └─ height    : integer
│
└─ annotations (array of object)
    └─ [annotation] (object)
        ├─ id            : integer
        ├─ image_id      : integer
        ├─ category_id   : integer
        ├─ bbox          : array of 4 numbers      # [x, y, width, height]
        ├─ area          : number                 # float
        ├─ segmentation  : array of array of number  # [[x1, y1, x2, y2, …]]
        ├─ iscrowd       : integer                # 0 or 1
        ├─ score         : number                 # float
        ├─ color_name    : string
        ├─ color_code    : string                 # e.g. "145-144-122"
        ├─ orientation   : string                 # e.g. "hor" or "ver"
        └─ writing_tool  : string                 # e.g. "pcl"
 

See ScriptSight tool for examples of how this computational visual catalogue can be used.

Acknowledgements: 
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.

The images are offered by the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA) as a part of their collaboration with the CSMC.