Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Tarin Clanuwat, a research scientist for the Google Brain Tokyo team, has been developing a mobile phone application to recognize cursive classical Japanese (kuzushiji) as modern Japanese text.
Although the technology for computers to read printed and handwritten characters (OCR) has been used since the 1960s, kuzushiji has a lack of clear character breaks and is often intricately laid out around pictures, making it much more difficult to read.
Consequently, only about 0.01% of the Japanese population can read kuzushiji fluently.
Miwo, an AI cursive script recognition app developed by Clanuwat and her team, uses deep learning and datasets to translate Japanese cursive into modern Japanese text, making classical Japanese texts more accessible.
Miwo utilizes the ROIS-DS Center for Open Data in the Humanities’ (CODH) KuroNet kuzushiji recognition system, trained on the kuzushiji dataset created by the National Institute of Japanese Literature.
Users can either upload photos from their mobile phone camera roll or use their camera in the app and the translated cursive text will be overlaid on the original photo.
Specific characters can be highlighted and selected, opening a menu which shows other similar-looking characters, and users can also access a dataset of the selected character as it appears in different classical texts.
The app has some accessibility features, such as text size and colored boxes to separate the cursive characters, making them more discernible from each other.
The user can edit and annotate any of the translated text as they see fit, as well as copy the text and conveniently paste it into another application.
The translated photos can also be saved in the app for easy reference or if the user wishes to continue editing the translation.
Bungaku Report suggests that miwo in its current state can read about 80% of well-organized texts from the Edo period, and around 60% of handwritten manuscripts.
Miwo is free of charge and has surpassed 16,000 downloads as of September 6.
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