license: mit
791 annotated images for PaddleOCR text detection — all in vertical (top-to-bottom) Chinese ancient literature layout.
This dataset is built specifically for the classic Chinese vertical typesetting you see in ancient books and documents. Instead of the usual left-to-right rows, the text flows down in columns — and PaddleOCR sometimes misses a lot of it in that format (see the original issue here: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR/issues/17856).
Every sample gives you:
- The original vertical scan/photograph
- A matching PaddleOCR detection annotation file (standard label format with rectangle coordinates for text regions)
Why this dataset?
Most public OCR datasets are horizontal and modern. Ancient Chinese vertical text is a blind spot for a lot of models, so I put this together to help close the gap. It’s perfect if you’re working on digitizing old books, historical archives, or any project that needs solid vertical detection.
Size
- 791 images + annotations
- Purely Ancient Chinese vertical layout (no mixed directions or languages)
How to use it
- Download
vertical_annotations.zip(361 MB). - Unzip — you’ll get the images and their paired annotation files.
- Drop them straight into your PaddleOCR training pipeline for the detection (det) task.
It builds from my ocr-producer tool (and the synthesis system) to generate extra synthetic vertical examples.
Structure (inside the zip)
The files are organized in the standard PaddleOCR detection style — one image + one annotation file per sample (exact folder layout matches what PaddleOCR expects).
License
MIT — use it freely for research, commercial work, or whatever you need. Attribution is appreciated but not required.
This one comes from the same workflow as my invoice-checkmark-annotations and the ocr-producer repo.
Contact
Questions, ideas for more vertical/ancient-text datasets, or just want to chat about OCR? Reach out at hi@support.alrowilde.com or open an issue on the ocr-producer GitHub.
Happy training — hope this helps your vertical OCR hit the next level! 📜