DeepScribe: Localization and Classification of Elamite Cuneiform Signs Via Deep Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Williams, Edward C., Su, Grace, Schloen, Sandra R., Prosser, Miller C., Paulus, Susanne, Krishnan, Sanjay
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Williams, Edward C.
Su, Grace
Schloen, Sandra R.
Prosser, Miller C.
Paulus, Susanne
Krishnan, Sanjay
author_facet Williams, Edward C.
Su, Grace
Schloen, Sandra R.
Prosser, Miller C.
Paulus, Susanne
Krishnan, Sanjay
contents Twenty-five hundred years ago, the paperwork of the Achaemenid Empire was recorded on clay tablets. In 1933, archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute (OI) found tens of thousands of these tablets and fragments during the excavation of Persepolis. Many of these tablets have been painstakingly photographed and annotated by expert cuneiformists, and now provide a rich dataset consisting of over 5,000 annotated tablet images and 100,000 cuneiform sign bounding boxes. We leverage this dataset to develop DeepScribe, a modular computer vision pipeline capable of localizing cuneiform signs and providing suggestions for the identity of each sign. We investigate the difficulty of learning subtasks relevant to cuneiform tablet transcription on ground-truth data, finding that a RetinaNet object detector can achieve a localization mAP of 0.78 and a ResNet classifier can achieve a top-5 sign classification accuracy of 0.89. The end-to-end pipeline achieves a top-5 classification accuracy of 0.80. As part of the classification module, DeepScribe groups cuneiform signs into morphological clusters. We consider how this automatic clustering approach differs from the organization of standard, printed sign lists and what we may learn from it. These components, trained individually, are sufficient to produce a system that can analyze photos of cuneiform tablets from the Achaemenid period and provide useful transliteration suggestions to researchers. We evaluate the model's end-to-end performance on locating and classifying signs, providing a roadmap to a linguistically-aware transliteration system, then consider the model's potential utility when applied to other periods of cuneiform writing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_01268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DeepScribe: Localization and Classification of Elamite Cuneiform Signs Via Deep Learning
Williams, Edward C.
Su, Grace
Schloen, Sandra R.
Prosser, Miller C.
Paulus, Susanne
Krishnan, Sanjay
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Digital Libraries
Information Retrieval
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the paperwork of the Achaemenid Empire was recorded on clay tablets. In 1933, archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute (OI) found tens of thousands of these tablets and fragments during the excavation of Persepolis. Many of these tablets have been painstakingly photographed and annotated by expert cuneiformists, and now provide a rich dataset consisting of over 5,000 annotated tablet images and 100,000 cuneiform sign bounding boxes. We leverage this dataset to develop DeepScribe, a modular computer vision pipeline capable of localizing cuneiform signs and providing suggestions for the identity of each sign. We investigate the difficulty of learning subtasks relevant to cuneiform tablet transcription on ground-truth data, finding that a RetinaNet object detector can achieve a localization mAP of 0.78 and a ResNet classifier can achieve a top-5 sign classification accuracy of 0.89. The end-to-end pipeline achieves a top-5 classification accuracy of 0.80. As part of the classification module, DeepScribe groups cuneiform signs into morphological clusters. We consider how this automatic clustering approach differs from the organization of standard, printed sign lists and what we may learn from it. These components, trained individually, are sufficient to produce a system that can analyze photos of cuneiform tablets from the Achaemenid period and provide useful transliteration suggestions to researchers. We evaluate the model's end-to-end performance on locating and classifying signs, providing a roadmap to a linguistically-aware transliteration system, then consider the model's potential utility when applied to other periods of cuneiform writing.
title DeepScribe: Localization and Classification of Elamite Cuneiform Signs Via Deep Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Digital Libraries
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01268