Design and Prototype of a Support System for Archeologists to Decode Scripts on Mokkan
Akihito Kitadai, Kei Saito, Daisuke Hachiya, Masaki Nakagawa, はじめ ばば, Akihiro Watanabe · 2005
This paper describes a design and prototype of a support system for archeologists to read the excavated from Heijyo-kyo, Japan (the ancient palace in the Nara period from AD. 710 to 794). A mokkan is a wooden tablet on which text was written by a brush. Many mokkans were used in the Nara period. Since most of unearthed mokkans have been stained, damaged, and degraded, it is extremely difficult even for archeologists to extract characters from badly blurred or missing ink on a mokkan. We realized binarization functions based on discriminant analysis to extract ink from brownish background. Then, we developed a character recognition function, which outputs candidates for partially missing patterns. The aim of this recognizer is to output candidates even for degraded or partially missing character patterns rather than to read handwritten characters at the maximum speed. We made also a graphical user interface to invoke the above functions, provide experts with suggestions and stimulate their inference. This system supports collaborative work among expert readers by sharing decoding processes and intermediate results of extracted ink images and character recognition.