Towards a Dataset for Paleographic Details in Historical Torah Scrolls

Laura Frank, Germaine Götzelmann, Danah Tonne

2025

Abstract

Historical textual witnesses used in religious practice have been a research interest for a long time but still remain mysterious. In particular, medieval Torah scrolls show irregularities in the scripture, whose intentions have not yet been revealed. In this paper, we assess the analysis of letter decorations from the perspective of computer vision and investigate the possibilities of extending qualitative research in Jewish Studies by quantitative analysis methods of computer science. For this purpose, we introduce a methodological approach to obtain a reproducible and extensible dataset of Hebrew letters and present a set of labels usable for various machine learning tasks. The evaluation of the dataset in terms of decoration recognition shows promising prediction accuracy rates of up to 90% with standard transfer learning methods and architectures.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Frank L., Götzelmann G. and Tonne D. (2025). Towards a Dataset for Paleographic Details in Historical Torah Scrolls. In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 926-933. DOI: 10.5220/0013173800003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp25,
author={Laura Frank and Germaine Götzelmann and Danah Tonne},
title={Towards a Dataset for Paleographic Details in Historical Torah Scrolls},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP},
year={2025},
pages={926-933},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013173800003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP
TI - Towards a Dataset for Paleographic Details in Historical Torah Scrolls
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Frank L.
AU - Götzelmann G.
AU - Tonne D.
PY - 2025
SP - 926
EP - 933
DO - 10.5220/0013173800003912
PB - SciTePress