Isolated Character Forms from Dated Syriac Manuscripts.

This paper describes a set of hand-isolated character samples selected from securely dated manuscripts written in Syriac between 300 and 1300 C.E., which are being made available for research purposes. The collection can be used for a number of applications, including ground truth for character segmentation and form analysis for paleographical dating. Several applications based upon convolutional neural networks demonstrate the possibilities of the data set.