dataset_info:
features:
- name: filename
dtype: string
- name: image
dtype: image
- name: text
dtype: string
splits:
- name: train
num_bytes: 164401783.625
num_examples: 2043
download_size: 161098467
dataset_size: 164401783.625
configs:
- config_name: default
data_files:
- split: train
path: data/train-*
license: mit
task_categories:
- translation
language:
- mr
tags:
- history,
size_categories:
- 1K<n<10K
MoDeTrans: Modi to Devanagari Transliteration Dataset
This dataset supports research in the transliteration of Modi script—an ancient Indian script historically used in Maharashtra—into Devanagari, the script currently used for Marathi and several other Indian languages.
The dataset was introduced in the following paper:
Historic Scripts to Modern Vision: A Novel Dataset and A VLM Framework for Transliteration of Modi Script to Devanagari
Harshal Kausadikar, Tanvi Kale, Onkar Susladkar, Sparsh Mittal
Accepted at ICDAR 2025
Paper Link
Dataset Features
- Modi script image patches
- Aligned Devanagari transliterations
- Covers a diverse range of historical Modi handwriting styles
- Suitable for OCR, script transliteration, vision-language modeling, and low-resource script research
Usage
This dataset is ideal for:
- Handwritten script recognition and transliteration
- Vision-language model (VLM) training for historical scripts
- Document digitization and cultural heritage preservation
SynthMoDe Dataset
The synthetic version of above MoDeTrans (Modi to Devanagari Transliteration) Dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/historyHulk/SynthMoDe
Citation
If you use this dataset in your research or publications, please cite the following paper:
@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-032-04630-7_3,
author="Kausadikar, Harshal
and Kale, Tanvi
and Susladkar, Onkar
and Mittal, Sparsh",
editor="Yin, Xu-Cheng
and Karatzas, Dimosthenis
and Lopresti, Daniel",
title="Historic Scripts to Modern Vision: A Novel Dataset and A VLM Framework for Transliteration of Modi Script to Devanagari",
booktitle="Document Analysis and Recognition -- ICDAR 2025",
year="2026",
publisher="Springer Nature Switzerland",
address="Cham",
pages="40--61",
abstract="In medieval India, the Marathi language was written using the Modi script. The texts written in Modi script include extensive knowledge about medieval sciences, medicines, land records and authentic evidence about Indian history. Around 40 million documents are in poor condition and have not yet been transliterated. Furthermore, only a few experts in this domain can transliterate this script into English or Devanagari. Most of the past research predominantly focuses on individual character recognition. A system that can transliterate Modi script documents to Devanagari script is needed. We propose the MoDeTrans dataset, comprising 2,043 images of Modi script documents accompanied by their corresponding textual transliterations in Devanagari. We further introduce MoScNet (Modi Script Network), a novel Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework for transliterating Modi script images into Devanagari text. MoScNet leverages Knowledge Distillation, where a student model learns from a teacher model to enhance transliteration performance. The final student model of MoScNet has better performance than the teacher model while having 163{\$}{\$}{\backslash}times {\$}{\$}{\texttimes}lower parameters. Our work is the first to perform direct transliteration from the handwritten Modi script to the Devanagari script. MoScNet also shows competitive results on the optical character recognition (OCR) task.",
isbn="978-3-032-04630-7"
}