The GBN Dataset (v1.0)[1] consists of 152 grayscale page images from eight diferent German-Brazilian historical newspapers, along with their binarized images and ground files. It is a dataset created for evaluation of layout analysis methods.
Complex layouts, poor preservation conditions of the paper, old spelling, different font sizes and the presence of multiple languages in the same page are some of the challenges of historical newspaper layout analysis that are present in the GBN Dataset. There are also pages with a slightly transparent paper and some blurs, which makes the dataset more challenging.
The dataset samples belong to the dbp digital collection from the dokumente.br initiative which has as one of the goals to digitally reconstruct the complete collection of these newspapers.
The pages of eight different newspaper titles were scanned at 600 dpi and are available in PNG format. The following table shows the composition and distribution of these images from the dataset.
| Newspaper Title | Publishing date | Script | Language | Image size (in pixels) | # training pages | # testing pages |
| “Der Gemeindebote” | 1935-1938 | Fraktur | German | 3850 x 5480 | 19 | 05 |
| “Der Jugendfreund” | 1911-1917 | Fraktur | German | from 2650 x 3950 to 5320 x 8050 |
15 | 03 |
| “Der Pioner” | 1888-1891 | Fraktur / Latin | Portuguese / German | 7100 x 10590 | 17 | 05 |
| “Der Sandwirt” | 1934-1940 | Fraktur | German | 4250 x 6020 | 17 | 05 |
| “Evangelissch-Lutherisches Kirchenblatt” | 1916-1919 | Fraktur | German | 2590 x 3690 |
17 | 05 |
| “Kolonie Zeitung” | 1863-1889 | Fraktur / Latin | Portuguese / German |
5470 x 7010 6700 x 8400 7050 x 9300 |
17 | 05 |
| “Gemeindeblatt” | 1938 | Fraktur | German | 3850 x 5870 |
– | 08 |
| “Heimatbote” | 1936 | Fraktur | German | 3850 x 5480 | – | 14 |
The GBN Dataset is composed of:
- grayscale images of the pages;
- binarized images of the pages;
- ground truth files for each of them (XML PAGE[2] and TXT). The XML PAGE files were produced with the Aletheia software and contain the geometric representation and the class (text, image, graphic or separator) of each region of the page. The TXT files contain the coordinates of each foreground pixel along with its corresponding class:
| Class label | Description |
| 0 | text: text with any font size. |
| 1 | image: photos. |
| 2 | graphic: family crest and other graphic symbols with text inside. |
| 3 | separator: column and line separators. |
How to obtain the Dataset
The GBN dataset is released for academic research only and is free to researchers from educational or research institutes for non-commercial purposes.
Training GBN v1.0 Dataset: training-GBNv1.zip
References
- Araujo, A. B. “Análise de layout de página em jornais históricos germano-brasileiros,” Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, 2019. https://acervodigital.ufpr.br/handle/1884/63706
- Pletschacher, S. and Antonacopoulos, A. “The PAGE (Page Analysis and Ground-Truth Elements) Format Framework,” in IEEE 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2010, pp. 257–260.
Contact
Please contact Alessandra Belézia Araujo (alessandra.belezia@ufpr.br) with questions or comments.