pykale/bln600-img-patch

BLN600 Image Patches

This dataset provides BLN600's image patches for fine-tuning vision-language models on post-OCR correction, introduced in "Image-Informed Post-OCR Correction with Vision-Language Models" (EMNLP 2026 Findings). Each patch corresponds to a text sequence in BLN600 and is cropped from the Gale British Library Newspapers collection, using word-level bounding boxes from the collection's ALTO XML OCR layout data. It is intended to be used alongside the code and CSVs in Shef-AIRE/vlms_post-ocr_correction, which provide the corresponding OCR text, ground truth, metadata, and CER/WER for each patch.

Data Fields

Field	Type	Description
Image Patch	string	Filename, joins to the Image Patch column in the code repo's CSVs
image	image	The cropped newspaper-page region (TIFF)

License

Released under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (non-commercial, no derivatives). Permission was granted by Gale on behalf of the company and the British Library partners for non-commercial release, publicly accessible with no additional access stipulations.

Citation

Citation to follow on publication.

@inproceedings{thomas-etal-2026-image,
    title = "Image-Informed Post-OCR Correction with Vision-Language Models",
    author = "Thomas, Alan  and
      Liu, Xianyuan  and
      Lu, Haiping  and
      Gaizauskas, Robert",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026",
    year = "2026",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
}