RPalk/czech_vital_records

Czech Historical Vital Records (19th Century)

The Czech Historical Vital Records Dataset is a collection of manually annotated images of 19th-century Czech birth, marriage, and death registers. This dataset was specifically created to support research into automated historical document processing, including layout analysis, handwritten text recognition, and post-processing methods for specialized archival documents. Expansion of the dataset is encouraged.

The dataset contains original documents scans along with PageXML transcriptions. The documents for the dataset were sourced from the digital collections of the State Regional Archives in Prague.

The dataset was collected as part of the Master's Thesis: "Automated Transcription and Search in Historical Records Using Handwritten Text Recognition".

For further information, please refer to the thesis text.

Citation

@misc{palkovic2025htr,
      AUTHOR = {Palkovič, Radoslav},
      TITLE = {Automated Transcription and Search in Historical Records Using Handwritten Text Recognition},
      YEAR = {2025},
      TYPE = {Master Thesis},
      INSTITUTION = {Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics},
      LOCATION = {Brno},
      SUPERVISOR = {Michal Batko}
}