Improvement of Oracle Bone Inscription Recognition Accuracy: A Deep Learning Perspective

Deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in handwriting recognition. Oracle bone inscriptions (OBI) are the earliest hieroglyphs in China and valuable resources for studying the etymology of Chinese characters. OBI are of important historical and cultural value in China; thus, textual research surrounding the characters of OBI is a huge challenge for archaeologists. In this work, we built a dataset named OBI-100, which contains 100 classes of oracle bone inscriptions collected from two OBI dictionaries. The dataset includes more than 128,000 character samples related to the natural environment, humans, animals, plants, etc. In addition, we propose improved models based on three typical deep convolutional network structures to recognize the OBI-100 dataset. By modifying the parameters, adjusting the network structures, and adopting optimization strategies, we demonstrate experimentally that these models perform fairly well in OBI recognition. For the 100-category OBI classification task, the optimal model achieves an accuracy of 99.5%, which shows competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art approaches. We hope that this work can provide a valuable tool for character recognition of OBI.