Recognition of the manuscripts of Peter I using computer vision

Speakers :
Proskuryakova Maria, researcher at the Scientific and Historical Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences ;
Denis Dmitrov, Executive Director of Data Research, Sber AI
Digital Peter is a joint project of the Russian Historical Society, the History of the Fatherland Foundation and Sberbank dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great. The new program, based on the "computer vision" technology, allows automatic recognition of Peter's handwritten texts of the late 17th - early 18th centuries. Russian developers managed to achieve a record quality of Cyrillic text decoding (97%), surpassing the performance of similar foreign programs.
Historians know that Peter I wrote illegibly, using foreign words and abbreviations, so deciphering his handwritten heritage has become a serious problem - there are still not many specialists in Russia who can parse the texts that Peter wrote. The creation of software for recognizing the autographs of the first emperor was a significant step forward for Russian historical science.
The Digital Peter project is aimed not only at professional researchers, but also at history buffs.
Everyone can get acquainted with the principles of the algorithm on a special website sber.ru/digital-petr. There is also an opportunity to independently download a scanned image of the manuscript of Peter I for its decoding.