Restoration-Guided Kuzushiji Character Recognition Framework under Seal Interference

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ju, Rui-Yang, Yamashita, Kohei, Kameko, Hirotaka, Mori, Shinsuke
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Ju, Rui-Yang
Yamashita, Kohei
Kameko, Hirotaka
Mori, Shinsuke
author_facet Ju, Rui-Yang
Yamashita, Kohei
Kameko, Hirotaka
Mori, Shinsuke
contents Kuzushiji was one of the most popular writing styles in pre-modern Japan and was widely used in both personal letters and official documents. However, due to its highly cursive forms and extensive glyph variations, most modern Japanese readers cannot directly interpret Kuzushiji characters. Therefore, recent research has focused on developing automated Kuzushiji character recognition methods, which have achieved satisfactory performance on relatively clean Kuzushiji document images. However, existing methods struggle to maintain recognition accuracy under seal interference (e.g., when seals overlap characters), despite the frequent occurrence of seals in pre-modern Japanese documents. To address this challenge, we propose a three-stage restoration-guided Kuzushiji character recognition (RG-KCR) framework specifically designed to mitigate seal interference. We construct datasets for evaluating Kuzushiji character detection (Stage 1) and classification (Stage 3). Experimental results show that the YOLOv12-medium model achieves a precision of 98.0% and a recall of 93.3% on the constructed test set. We quantitatively evaluate the restoration performance of Stage 2 using PSNR and SSIM. In addition, we conduct an ablation study to demonstrate that Stage 2 improves the Top-1 accuracy of Metom, a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based Kuzushiji classifier employed in Stage 3, from 93.45% to 95.33%. The implementation code of this work is available at https://ruiyangju.github.io/RG-KCR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19086
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Restoration-Guided Kuzushiji Character Recognition Framework under Seal Interference
Ju, Rui-Yang
Yamashita, Kohei
Kameko, Hirotaka
Mori, Shinsuke
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Kuzushiji was one of the most popular writing styles in pre-modern Japan and was widely used in both personal letters and official documents. However, due to its highly cursive forms and extensive glyph variations, most modern Japanese readers cannot directly interpret Kuzushiji characters. Therefore, recent research has focused on developing automated Kuzushiji character recognition methods, which have achieved satisfactory performance on relatively clean Kuzushiji document images. However, existing methods struggle to maintain recognition accuracy under seal interference (e.g., when seals overlap characters), despite the frequent occurrence of seals in pre-modern Japanese documents. To address this challenge, we propose a three-stage restoration-guided Kuzushiji character recognition (RG-KCR) framework specifically designed to mitigate seal interference. We construct datasets for evaluating Kuzushiji character detection (Stage 1) and classification (Stage 3). Experimental results show that the YOLOv12-medium model achieves a precision of 98.0% and a recall of 93.3% on the constructed test set. We quantitatively evaluate the restoration performance of Stage 2 using PSNR and SSIM. In addition, we conduct an ablation study to demonstrate that Stage 2 improves the Top-1 accuracy of Metom, a Vision Transformer (ViT)-based Kuzushiji classifier employed in Stage 3, from 93.45% to 95.33%. The implementation code of this work is available at https://ruiyangju.github.io/RG-KCR.
title Restoration-Guided Kuzushiji Character Recognition Framework under Seal Interference
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19086