RanPil: New Dataset and Benchmark for Offline Handwritten Korean Text Recognition

In recent years, since deep learning technology have been applied to handwritten text recognition, the need for handwritten document image Datasets has been growing more and more. In particular, the development of the dataset is of great significance for improving performance of handwritten Korean text recognition because no dataset for handwritten Korean text recognition has been published. In this paper, we present the “RanPil”, a new training and performance evaluation dataset for handwritten Korean text recognition, which consists of a total of 8,600 pages of images (182,000 text lines and 4,300,000 characters) written by 1,804 people. We evaluate writing- diversity of handwritten document images, such as text line spacing, text line slope, character size, word spacing, and character compactness. In addition, we propose an MOS (Mean Opinion Score) evaluation method for the scrawl-level. Finally, we evaluate the performance of TrOCR based on vision encoder and decoder with a test dataset classified by the scrawl-levels.