Stephan Unter

About Me

Stephan M. Unter is a postdoctoral researcher and Kempe Fellow for Historical Document Analysis under the supervision of Prof. Elisa Barney Smith. He received an M.A. in Egyptology from the LMU Munich in 2013 and an M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Basel in 2019. In his PhD thesis, which he defended at the University of Basel in 2024, he applied machine learning methods to automatically analyse and support the reconstruction of a highly fragmented corpus of ancient Egyptian hieratic papyri. His current interests include handwriting analysis, document layout analysis, writer identification and attribution, and the application of NLP methods to ancient texts.

Publications

• [2026] Stephan M. Unter et al., "DDD - Diagnostic Deir el-Medina Dataset", DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20553713.
• [2026] Gayan H. Pathirage, Stephan M. Unter, Simon Corbillé, Elisa H. Barney Smith, "Generalization of Text Line Segmentation for HTR in Historical Documents", in: 8th International Workshop on Historical Document Imaging and Processing 2026 (accepted).
• [2026] Stephan M. Unter, Chang Liu, Elisa H. Barney Smith, "Generalized Open-set Single-shot Character Recognition on Ancient Egyptian Hieratic Characters", in: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2026 (accepted).
• [2026] Stephan M. Unter, Elena L. Hertel, "DDD - A Diagnostic Dataset for Character Recognition and Detection on Ancient Egyptian Hieratic Characters and Words", in: International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) 2026 (accepted).
• [2025] Stephan M. Unter, Egyptology & AI. Understanding Ancient Mysteries with Modern AI. Public outreach talk at the Vetenskapens Hus in Luleå. Recording available at: https://www.youtube.com/live/kRrwe4-L2rE.