APWD: Assamese Printed Word Dataset from Shankari (1490–1700) and Jonaki (1889–1940) Literary Eras

APWD: Assamese Printed Word Dataset from Shankari (1490–1700) and Jonaki (1889–1940) Literary Eras OVERVIEW--------APWD is a large-scale, quality-validated dataset of 39,915 printed Assamese word images extracted from seven classical texts spanning 500 years of literary heritage (1490–1940). The dataset bridges two major literary periods: the Vaishnavite Age (Shankari Era) and the Romantic Age (Jonaki Era). DATASET COMPOSITION-------------------Total Images: 39,915 word images (PNG format)Classes: 7 (one per source text)Resolution: 64×64 to 256×256 pixels (variable)Format: Grayscale PNG images Source Distribution: • Gauburha: 2,476 images (6.2%) • Jilikoni: 4,660 images (11.7%) • Kirtan_Ghosha: 11,265 images (28.2%) • Miri-Jiyori: 6,288 images (15.8%) • Naam_Ghosha: 1,643 images (4.1%) • burhi_aair_xadhu: 11,164 images (28.0%) • kokadeuta_aru_natilora: 2,419 images (6.1%) QUALITY ASSURANCE-----------------All images underwent rigorous quality validation: • OCR-based filtering to remove non-word content • Shape-based filtering for image quality • Manual validation of filtered samples • 10-fold cross-validation: 0.8% error rate (99.2% accuracy) The balanced subset (11,501 images) achieved the highest accuracy during validation testing. METHODOLOGY-----------1. Source texts digitised and processed2. Word segmentation using image processing3. Quality filtering using OCR and shape analysis4. Manual validation on random samples5. Final balanced dataset creation USAGE & APPLICATIONS--------------------This dataset is suitable for: • Content-Based Image Retrieval • Assamese script recognition • Historical document analysis • Low-resource language processing • Deep learning benchmarking Note: This dataset was created as a part of PhD research on "Document Retrieval for Assamese Scripts using Content-Based Image Retrieval Techniques" by Naiwrita Borah under the guidance of Dr Udayan Baruah and Dr Barnali Dey at the Department of IT, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Sikkim Manipal University (2019–2025).