Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'05)
Support System for Archeologists to Read Scripts on Mokkans
Seoul, Korea
August 31-September 01
ISBN: 0-7695-2420-6
Kei Saito, Tokyo Univ. of Agri. & Tech., Japan
Daisuke Hachiya, Faculty of Technology, Tokyo Univ. of Agri. & Tech., Japan
This paper describes a support system for archeologists to read "mokkan". A mokkan is a wooden tablet on which text was written by a brush. Many mokkans used in Nara period (from AD. 710 to 794) are being excavated from Heijyo-kyo, Japan (the ancient court in the Nara period). The support system is for archeologists who read mokkans that have been stained, damaged and degraded under the soil. Such mokkans are hard to read even for expert readers. However, the binarization functions of the system extract ink from the image of the mokkans and the character recognition function outputs candidates even for degraded or partially missing character patterns. We made also a graphical user interface to invoke the above functions, provide experts with suggestions and stimulate their inference. Archeologists in the experiment for evaluation enthusiastically accepted the system.
Citation:
Akihito Kitadai, Kei Saito, Daisuke Hachiya, Masaki Nakagawa, "Support System for Archeologists to Read Scripts on Mokkans," icdar, pp.1030-1034, Eighth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR'05), 2005