Character Detection using YOLO for Writer Identification in multiple Medieval books

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: di Freca, Alessandra Scotto, Alessandro, Tiziana D, Fontanella, Francesco, Sarria, Filippo, De Stefano, Claudio
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author di Freca, Alessandra Scotto
Alessandro, Tiziana D
Fontanella, Francesco
Sarria, Filippo
De Stefano, Claudio
author_facet di Freca, Alessandra Scotto
Alessandro, Tiziana D
Fontanella, Francesco
Sarria, Filippo
De Stefano, Claudio
contents Paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting, its key objectives include the dating of manuscripts and understanding the evolution of writing. Estimating when a document was written and tracing the development of scripts and writing styles can be aided by identifying the individual scribes who contributed to a medieval manuscript. Although digital technologies have made significant progress in this field, the general problem remains unsolved and continues to pose open challenges. ... We previously proposed an approach focused on identifying specific letters or abbreviations that characterize each writer. In that study, we considered the letter "a", as it was widely present on all pages of text and highly distinctive, according to the suggestions of expert paleographers. We used template matching techniques to detect the occurrences of the character "a" on each page and the convolutional neural network (CNN) to attribute each instance to the correct scribe. Moving from the interesting results achieved from this previous system and being aware of the limitations of the template matching technique, which requires an appropriate threshold to work, we decided to experiment in the same framework with the use of the YOLO object detection model to identify the scribe who contributed to the writing of different medieval books. We considered the fifth version of YOLO to implement the YOLO object detection model, which completely substituted the template matching and CNN used in the previous work. The experimental results demonstrate that YOLO effectively extracts a greater number of letters considered, leading to a more accurate second-stage classification. Furthermore, the YOLO confidence score provides a foundation for developing a system that applies a rejection threshold, enabling reliable writer identification even in unseen manuscripts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04834
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Character Detection using YOLO for Writer Identification in multiple Medieval books
di Freca, Alessandra Scotto
Alessandro, Tiziana D
Fontanella, Francesco
Sarria, Filippo
De Stefano, Claudio
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Paleography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting, its key objectives include the dating of manuscripts and understanding the evolution of writing. Estimating when a document was written and tracing the development of scripts and writing styles can be aided by identifying the individual scribes who contributed to a medieval manuscript. Although digital technologies have made significant progress in this field, the general problem remains unsolved and continues to pose open challenges. ... We previously proposed an approach focused on identifying specific letters or abbreviations that characterize each writer. In that study, we considered the letter "a", as it was widely present on all pages of text and highly distinctive, according to the suggestions of expert paleographers. We used template matching techniques to detect the occurrences of the character "a" on each page and the convolutional neural network (CNN) to attribute each instance to the correct scribe. Moving from the interesting results achieved from this previous system and being aware of the limitations of the template matching technique, which requires an appropriate threshold to work, we decided to experiment in the same framework with the use of the YOLO object detection model to identify the scribe who contributed to the writing of different medieval books. We considered the fifth version of YOLO to implement the YOLO object detection model, which completely substituted the template matching and CNN used in the previous work. The experimental results demonstrate that YOLO effectively extracts a greater number of letters considered, leading to a more accurate second-stage classification. Furthermore, the YOLO confidence score provides a foundation for developing a system that applies a rejection threshold, enabling reliable writer identification even in unseen manuscripts.
title Character Detection using YOLO for Writer Identification in multiple Medieval books
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04834