Instance Segmentation of Characters Recognized in Palmyrene Aramaic Inscriptions

CMES - Computer Modeling in Engineering and Sciences. 2024. Vol. 140. No. 3. P. 2869–2889.

Hamplová A., Lyavdansky A., Novák T., Svojše O., Franc D., Veselý A.

This study presents a single-class and multi-class instance segmentation approach applied to ancient Palmyrene inscriptions, employing two state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms, namely YOLOv8 and Roboflow 3.0. The goal is to contribute to the preservation and understanding of historical texts, showcasing the potential of modern deep learning methods in archaeological research. Our research culminates in several key findings and scientific contributions. We comprehensively compare the performance of YOLOv8 and Roboflow 3.0 in the context of Palmyrene character segmentation—this comparative analysis mainly focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of each algorithm in this context. We also created and annotated an extensive dataset of Palmyrene inscriptions, a crucial resource for further research in the field. The dataset serves for training and evaluating the segmentation models. We employ comparative evaluation metrics to quantitatively assess the segmentation results, ensuring the reliability and reproducibility of our findings and we present custom visualization tools for predicted segmentation masks. Our study advances the state of the art in semi-automatic reading of Palmyrene inscriptions and establishes a benchmark for future research. The availability of the Palmyrene dataset and the insights into algorithm performance contribute to the broader understanding of historical text analysis.
 

Keywords: компьютерное зрение, сегментация изображений, древние языки, оптическое распознавание символов, Ancient languages, Optical character recognition (OCR), Computer Vision, instance segmentation, Palmyrene script, пальмирское письмо