Automatic Uncertainty-Aware Synthetic Data Bootstrapping for Historical Map Segmentation

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Main Authors: Arzoumanidis, Lukas, Knechtel, Julius, Haunert, Jan-Henrik, Dehbi, Youness
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Arzoumanidis, Lukas
Knechtel, Julius
Haunert, Jan-Henrik
Dehbi, Youness
author_facet Arzoumanidis, Lukas
Knechtel, Julius
Haunert, Jan-Henrik
Dehbi, Youness
contents The automated analysis of historical documents, particularly maps, has drastically benefited from advances in deep learning and its success across various computer vision applications. However, most deep learning-based methods heavily rely on large amounts of annotated training data, which are typically unavailable for historical maps, especially for those belonging to specific, homogeneous cartographic domains, also known as corpora. Creating high-quality training data suitable for machine learning often takes a significant amount of time and involves extensive manual effort. While synthetic training data can alleviate the scarcity of real-world samples, it often lacks the affinity (realism) and diversity (variation) necessary for effective learning. By transferring the cartographic style of a historical map corpus onto modern vector data, we bootstrap an effectively unlimited number of synthetic historical maps suitable for tasks such as land-cover interpretation of a homogeneous historical map corpus. We propose an automatic deep generative approach and an alternative manual stochastic degradation technique to emulate the visual uncertainty and noise, also known as aleatoric uncertainty, commonly observed in historical map scans. To quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness and applicability of our approach, the bootstrapped training datasets were employed for domain-adaptive semantic segmentation on a homogeneous map corpus using a Self-Constructing Graph Convolutional Network, enabling a comprehensive assessment of the impact of our data bootstrapping methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_15875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automatic Uncertainty-Aware Synthetic Data Bootstrapping for Historical Map Segmentation
Arzoumanidis, Lukas
Knechtel, Julius
Haunert, Jan-Henrik
Dehbi, Youness
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The automated analysis of historical documents, particularly maps, has drastically benefited from advances in deep learning and its success across various computer vision applications. However, most deep learning-based methods heavily rely on large amounts of annotated training data, which are typically unavailable for historical maps, especially for those belonging to specific, homogeneous cartographic domains, also known as corpora. Creating high-quality training data suitable for machine learning often takes a significant amount of time and involves extensive manual effort. While synthetic training data can alleviate the scarcity of real-world samples, it often lacks the affinity (realism) and diversity (variation) necessary for effective learning. By transferring the cartographic style of a historical map corpus onto modern vector data, we bootstrap an effectively unlimited number of synthetic historical maps suitable for tasks such as land-cover interpretation of a homogeneous historical map corpus. We propose an automatic deep generative approach and an alternative manual stochastic degradation technique to emulate the visual uncertainty and noise, also known as aleatoric uncertainty, commonly observed in historical map scans. To quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness and applicability of our approach, the bootstrapped training datasets were employed for domain-adaptive semantic segmentation on a homogeneous map corpus using a Self-Constructing Graph Convolutional Network, enabling a comprehensive assessment of the impact of our data bootstrapping methods.
title Automatic Uncertainty-Aware Synthetic Data Bootstrapping for Historical Map Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15875