MapReader: Open software for the visual analysis ofmaps

MapReader is an interdisciplinary software library for processing digitized maps (Hosseini et al., 2022a) and other types of images with two tasks: patch classification and text spotting.Patch classification works by 'patching' images into small, custom-sized cells which are then classified according to the user's needs.Text spotting detects and recognizes text.MapReader offers a flexible pipeline which can be used both for manual annotation of small datasets as well as for computer-vision-based inference of large collections.As an example, in Hosseini et al. (2022a), we annotated 62,020 patches, trained a suite of computer vision models and performed model inference on approximately 30.5 million patches.