September 5, 2025 Dataset Open Access

The DLA-RMR dataset: Annotated subset of RMR notebooks for CVC development

Hussein Mohammed; Quang-Vinh Dang

What’s new in this version: This is the first complete version (v1.0). All images are in .png format, and the dataset annotations are divided into training (80 images) and test (20 images) sets.

This dataset is structured into four components, each serving a distinct role in the development of a document analysis system. 

1. Word-level annotations are provided in the file word_annotations_for_cropped_images.json. These annotations describe the images contained in the cropped_images folder. Each entry specifies the location of a word as a polygon, together with its orientation (horizontal, vertical, or tilted) and the type of writing implement used (ink or pencil). Additional metadata, such as bounding boxes and segmentation areas, is also included.

2. Cropped images are stored in the cropped_images folder. This set comprises 50 images, each containing only the primary page extracted from the corresponding full notebook scans.

3. Full images are located in the full_images folder. This collection also contains 50 items, representing the complete notebook scans in which the primary page appears alongside other material.

4. Page-level annotations are contained in the page_annotations folder. These are provided in YOLO format, with a single class (page) defined in classes.txt. Each annotation file specifies the bounding box of the primary page within the corresponding image in the full_images folder.

Examples illustrate the annotation structure. In the JSON file, a typical word annotation records polygon coordinates, the attribute "orientation": "horizontal", and "writing_tool": "pencil". In the YOLO annotations, a sample entry such as 0 0.499023 0.500776 0.777344 0.816912 denotes the normalised coordinates of the primary page bounding box.

Acknowledgement:

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 taken from notebook pages of Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA), A:Rilke-Archiv Gernsbach. 

We thank Hui Xu for her support in annotating the images.