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The humanities have for a long time been a collection of fields that have not gained from the advancements in computational power, as predicted by Moore´s law.  Fields like medicine, biology, physics, chemistry, geology and economics have all developed quantitative tools that take advantage of the exponential increase of processing power over time.  Recent advances in computerized pattern recognition, in combination with a rapid digitization of historical document collections around the world, is about to change this. The first part of this dissertation focuses on constructing a full system for finding handwritten words in historical manuscripts. A novel segmentation algorithm is presented, capable of finding and separating text lines in pre-modern manuscripts.  Text recognition is performed by translating the image data of the text lines into sequences of numbers, called features. Commonly used features are analysed and evaluated on manuscript sources from the Uppsala University library Carolina Rediviva and the US Library of Congress.  Decoding the text in the vast number of photographed manuscripts from our libraries makes computational linguistics and social network analysis directly applicable to historical sources. Hence, text recognition is considered a key technology for the future of computerized research methods in the humanities. The second part of this thesis addresses digital palaeography, using a computers superior capacity for endlessly performing measurements on ink stroke shapes. Objective criteria of character shapes only partly catches what a palaeographer use for assessing similarity. The palaeographer often gets a feel for the scribe's style.  This is, however, hard to quantify.  A method for identifying the scribal hands of a pre-modern copy of the revelations of saint Bridget of Sweden, using semi-supervised learning, is presented.  Methods for production year estimation are presented and evaluated on a collection with close to 11000 medieval charters.  The production dates are estimated using a Gaussian process, where the uncertainty is inferred together with the most likely production year. In summary, this dissertation presents several novel methods related to image analysis and machine learning. In combination with recent advances of the field, they enable efficient computational analysis of very large collections of historical documents. / q2b

In this work the concept of multistage neural networks is going to be presented. The possibility of using this type of structure for pattern recognition would be discussed and examined with chosen problem from eld area. The results of experiment would be confront with other possible methods used for the problem.

Block characters are often used when filling out forms, for example when writing ones personal number. The question of whether or not there is recoverable, biometric (identity related) information within individual digits of hand written personal numbers is then relevant. This thesis investigates the question by using both handcrafted features and extracting features via Deep learning (DL) models, and successively limiting the amount of available training samples. Some recent works using DL have presented semi-supervised methods using Generative adveserial network (GAN) generated data together with a modified Label smoothing regularization (LSR) function. Using this training method might improve performance on a baseline fully supervised model when doing authentication. This work additionally proposes a novel modified LSR function named Bootstrap label smooting regularizer (BLSR) designed to mitigate some of the problems of previous methods, and is compared to the others. The DL feature extraction is done by training a ResNet50 model to recognize writers of a personal numbers and then extracting the feature vector from the second to last layer of the network.Results show a clear indication of recoverable identity related information within the hand written (personal number) digits in boxes. Our results indicate an authentication performance, expressed in Equal error rate (EER), of around 25% with handcrafted features. The same performance measured in EER was between 20-30% when using the features extracted from the DL model. The DL methods, while showing potential for greater performance than the handcrafted, seem to suffer from fluctuation (noisiness) of results, making conclusions on their use in practice hard to draw. Additionally when using 1-2 training samples the handcrafted features easily beat the DL methods.When using the LSR variant semi-supervised methods there is no noticeable performance boost and BLSR gets the second best results among the alternatives.