Fleuron: A Database of Eighteenth-Century Printers' Ornaments

Actually all sorts of real world data, like photos of old inscriptions and the like.

"We developed a program to recognise printers’ ornaments and extract them from the full page images into a new database."

"The approach adopted here is a morphological one. A series of morphological operations (e.g. filtering, dilution, erosion, etc) is applied on each image followed by a series of heuristics to filter out those connected components that are deemed to be printers ornaments."

I followed the trail to the lead software developer, an expert in machine learning and data science. In his past projects page [1], he described this project under the heading "Image Processing":

"the problem was to automatically detect and extract printers ornaments from millions of scanned 16th, 17th, and 18th century books"

If they would release the dataset of these rough-quality images of printers' ornaments, perhaps someone from the public (i.e., open source) would be daring enough to try generating SVGs. I know practically nothing about deep learning (but curious and willing to learn :), but I'm supposing this wouldn't count as "second-order machine learning"..

Edit: Further down the rabbit hole, there do seem to be some promising/interesting work in this direction, such as "Conversion of Bitmaps into Scalable Function Graphics using a Pre-trained Neural Network Database" [2].

---

[0] https://fleuron.lib.cam.ac.uk/about

[1] https://dirkgorissen.com/projects/

[2] https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/67bc9f_358dcf74893e4021925ff0...