Automatic Egyptian hieroglyph recognition by retrieving images as texts
Morris Franken, Jan C. van Gemert · 2013
In this paper we propose an approach for automatically recognizing ancient Egyptian hieroglyph from photographs. To this end we first manually annotated and segmented a large collection of nearly 4,000 hieroglyphs. In our automatic approach we localize and segment each individual hieroglyph, determine the reading order and subsequently evaluate 5 visual descriptors in 3 different matching schemes to evaluate visual hieroglyph recognition. In addition to visual-only cues, we use a corpus of Egyptian texts to learn language models that help re-rank the visual output.