GloSAT Table Dataset

Table structure recognition annotations for scanned historical meteorological logbook pages from the GloSAT project. Images are scanned pages from 9 archival sources spanning the 19th and early 20th centuries. Each image is annotated with table bounding boxes and per-cell bounding boxes with row/column indices and header flags.

This dataset supports table detection and table structure recognition (TSR) tasks on historical document images.

No transcribed cell content is included. This is a structure-only dataset: it provides spatial layout (bounding boxes and grid topology) but not the text values inside cells.

Configs

Config	Description	Cells per table (mean)	Cells per table (max)
coarse	Merged cells treated as single units	156	476
fine	Each physical cell annotated individually	488	2737

The two configs cover the same 499 images with the same train/test split. Use coarse for tasks that treat spanning cells as atomic units; use fine for tasks that require individual cell boundaries.

Splits

Split	Images
train	371
test	129

Schema

Each row represents one scanned page image.

Field	Type	Description
image_id	string	Numeric image identifier (matches original Zenodo filenames)
image	Image	Embedded JPEG bytes
width	int32	Image width in pixels
height	int32	Image height in pixels
source	string	Source archive name (see provenance table below)
tables	Sequence	List of annotated tables on the page
tables.bbox	Sequence[int32]	Table bounding box: [xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax] in image pixel coordinates
tables.type	string	Table border style (e.g., semi-bordered)
tables.cells	Sequence	List of annotated cells within the table
tables.cells.bbox	Sequence[int32]	Cell bounding box: [xmin, ymin, xmax, ymax]
tables.cells.row_start	int32	Zero-indexed start row
tables.cells.row_end	int32	Zero-indexed end row (exclusive)
tables.cells.col_start	int32	Zero-indexed start column
tables.cells.col_end	int32	Zero-indexed end column (exclusive)
tables.cells.header	bool	True if the cell is a header cell

All coordinates are in original image pixel space. 39% of train images contain more than one table per page.

Source provenance

Source	Images	Description
DWR	93	Daily Weather Reports
Ben_Nevis	97	Ben Nevis Observatory records
WR_10_years	97	10-year weather registers
WesTech_Rodgers	82	WesTech / Rodgers logbooks
WR_Devon_Extern	33	Devon external weather registers
20cr_Natal_Witnes	26	20th Century Reanalysis: Natal Witness
20cr_DWR_MO	24	20th Century Reanalysis: DWR (Met Office)
20cr_DWR_NOAA	24	20th Century Reanalysis: DWR (NOAA)
20cr_Kubota	24	20th Century Reanalysis: Kubota

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# Fine-grained cell annotations
ds = load_dataset("rootsautomation/GloSAT", "fine")
row = ds["train"][0]

print(row["image_id"], row["source"], row["width"], row["height"])
# Access table annotations
for i, bbox in enumerate(row["tables"]["bbox"]):
    cells = row["tables"]["cells"][i]
    print(f"Table {i}: bbox={bbox}, {len(cells['bbox'])} cells")

License

This dataset is released under a BSD 4-Clause license (see LICENSE). The 4-Clause variant includes an advertising clause: any materials or publications that use or reference this dataset must acknowledge the GloSAT project in their advertising or documentation.

Original data source: Zenodo record 5363457.

Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the original GloSAT paper:

@inproceedings{glosat2021,
  title     = {GloSAT Historical Measurement Table Dataset: End-to-End Table Processing with Columns Delimited at Run-Time},
  author    = {Middleton, Stuart E. and Kordopatis-Zilos, Giorgos and Sheridan, Iain},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing (HIP)},
  year      = {2021},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.5363457}
}