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| license: mit |
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| **791 annotated images for PaddleOCR text detection — all in vertical (top-to-bottom) Chinese ancient literature layout.** |
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| 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). |
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| Every sample gives you: |
| - The original vertical scan/photograph |
| - A matching PaddleOCR detection annotation file (standard label format with rectangle coordinates for text regions) |
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| ## 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. |
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| ## Size |
| - 791 images + annotations |
| - Purely Ancient Chinese vertical layout (no mixed directions or languages) |
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| ## How to use it |
| 1. Download `vertical_annotations.zip` (361 MB). |
| 2. Unzip — you’ll get the images and their paired annotation files. |
| 3. Drop them straight into your PaddleOCR training pipeline for the detection (det) task. |
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| It builds from my [ocr-producer](https://github.com/alrowilde/ocr-producer) tool (and the [synthesis system](https://github.com/alrowilde/ocr-producer/blob/main/synthesisSystem/README.md)) to generate extra synthetic vertical examples. |
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| ## 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). |
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| ## License |
| MIT — use it freely for research, commercial work, or whatever you need. Attribution is appreciated but not required. |
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| This one comes from the same workflow as my [invoice-checkmark-annotations](https://huggingface.co/datasets/AlroWilde/invoice-checkmark-annotations) and the ocr-producer repo. |
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| ## 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. |
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| Happy training — hope this helps your vertical OCR hit the next level! 📜 |
