Manchu Script Letters Dataset Creation and Labeling

The Manchu language holds historical significance, but a complete dataset of Manchu script letters for training optical character recognition machine-learning models is currently unavailable.Therefore, this paper describes the process of creating a robust dataset of extracted Manchu script letters.Rather than performing automatic letter segmentation based on whitespace or the thickness of the central word stem, an image of the Manchu script was manually inspected, and one copy of the desired letter was selected as a region of interest.This selected region of interest was used as a template to match all other occurrences of the same letter within the Manchu script image.Although the dataset in this study contained only 4,000 images of five Manchu script letters, these letters were collected from twenty-eight writing styles.A full dataset of Manchu letters is expected to be obtained through this process.The collected dataset was normalized and trained using a simple convolutional neural network to verify its effectiveness.