Historical Manuscript Production Date Estimation Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep learning has thus far not been used for dating of pre-modern handwritten documents. In this paper, we propose ways of using deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to estimate production dates for such manuscripts. In our approach, a CNN can either be used directly for estimating the production date or as a feature learning framework for other regression techniques. We explore the feature learning approach using Gaussian Processes regression and Support Vector Regression. The evaluation is performed on a unique large dataset of over 10000 medieval charters from the Swedish collection Svenskt Diplomatariums huvudkartotek (SDHK). We show that deep learning is applicable to the task of dating documents and that the performance is on average comparable to that of a human expert.