Archival Faces: Detection of Faces in Digitized Historical Documents

When digitizing historical archives, it is necessary to search for the faces of celebrities and ordinary people, especially in newspapers, link them to the surrounding text, and make them searchable. Existing face detectors on datasets of scanned historical documents fail remarkably -- current detection tools only achieve around $24\%$ mAP at $50:90\%$ IoU. This work compensates for this failure by introducing a new manually annotated domain-specific dataset in the style of the popular Wider Face dataset, containing 2.2k new images from digitized historical newspapers from the $19^{th}$ to $20^{th}$ century, with 11k new bounding-box annotations and associated facial landmarks. This dataset allows existing detectors to be retrained to bring their results closer to the standard in the field of face detection in the wild. We report several experimental results comparing different families of fine-tuned detectors against publicly available pre-trained face detectors and ablation studies of multiple detector sizes with comprehensive detection and landmark prediction performance results.

BiblioPage: A Dataset of Scanned Title Pages for Bibliographic Metadata Extraction

Manual digitization of bibliographic metadata is time consuming and labor intensive, especially for historical and real-world archives with highly variable formatting across documents. Despite advances in machine learning, the absence of dedicated datasets for metadata extraction hinders automation. To address this gap, we introduce BiblioPage, a dataset of scanned title pages annotated with structured bibliographic metadata. The dataset consists of approximately 2,000 monograph title pages collected from 14 Czech libraries, spanning a wide range of publication periods, typographic styles, and layout structures. Each title page is annotated with 16 bibliographic attributes, including title, contributors, and publication metadata, along with precise positional information in the form of bounding boxes. To extract structured information from this dataset, we valuated object detection models such as YOLO and DETR combined with transformer-based OCR, achieving a maximum mAP of 52 and an F1 score of 59. Additionally, we assess the performance of various visual large language models, including LlamA 3.2-Vision and GPT-4o, with the best model reaching an F1 score of 67. BiblioPage serves as a real-world benchmark for bibliographic metadata extraction, contributing to document understanding, document question answering, and document information extraction. Dataset and evaluation scripts are availible at: https://github.com/DCGM/biblio-dataset