Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBI) is one of the oldest scripts in the world. The rejoining of Oracle Bone (OB) fragments is of vital importance to the research of ancient scripts and history. Although significant progress has been achieved in the past decades, the rejoining work still heavily relies on domain knowledge and manual work, thus remains a low efficient and time-consuming process Therefore, an automatic and practical algorithm/system for OB rejoining is of great value to the OBI community. To this end, we collect a real-world dataset for rejoining Oracle Bone fragments, namely OB-Rejoin, which consists of 998 OB rubbing images that suffer from low quality image problems, due to intrinsic underground eroding over time and extrinsic imaging conditions in the past. Moreover, a practical Self-Supervised Splicing Network, S3-Net, is proposed to rejoin the OB fragments based on shape similarity of their borderlines. Specifically, we first transform the manually annotated borderline strokes of OB images into times series style shape representations, which are fed as input to a Generative Adversarial Network for augmenting positive pairs of rejoinable OBs for each OB fragment that does not have rejoinable counterparts. A Siamese network is trained on such augmented data in a contrastive learning manner to retrieve the matching OB fragments of an unseen query from an OB fragment gallery. Experiments on the OB-Rejoin benchmark show that our data-driven approach outperforms two recent methods for time-series analysis. In order to demonstrate its practical potential, we deploy the proposed S3-Net method in real tests and ultimately discover dozens of new rejoinings missed by domain experts for decades.

The rejoining of oracle bone rubbings is a fundamental topic for oracle research. However, it is a tough task to reassemble severely broken oracle bone rubbings because of detail loss in manual labeling, the great time consumption of rejoining, and the low accuracy of results. To overcome the challenges, we introduce a novel CFDA&CAP algorithm that consists of the Curve Fitting Degree Analysis (CFDA) algorithm and the Correlation Analysis of Pearson (CAP) algorithm. First, the orthogonalization system is constructed to extract local features based on the curve features analysis. Second, the global feature descriptor is depicted by using coordinate points sequences. Third, we screen candidate curves based on the features as well as the CFDA algorithm, so the search range of the candidates is narrowed down. Finally, image recommendation libraries for target curves are generated by adopting the CAP algorithm, and the rank for each target matching curve generates simultaneously for result evaluation. With experiments, the proposed method shows a good effect in rejoining oracle bone rubbings automatically: (1) it improves the average accuracy rate of curve matching up to 84%, and (2) for a low-resource task, the accuracy of our method has 25% higher accuracy than that of other methods.

Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBI) research is very meaningful for both history and literature. In this paper, we introduce our contributions in AI-Powered Oracle Bone (OB) fragments rejoining and OBI recognition. (1) We build a real-world dataset OB-Rejoin, and propose an effective OB rejoining algorithm which yields a top-10 accuracy of 98.39%. (2) We design a practical annotation software to facilitate OBI annotation, and build OracleBone-8000, a large-scale dataset with character-level annotations. We adopt deep learning based scene text detection algorithms for OBI localization, which yield an F-score of 89.7%. We propose a novel deep template matching algorithm for OBI recognition which achieves an overall accuracy of 80.9%. Since we have been cooperating closely with OBI domain experts, our effort above helps advance their research. The resources of this work are available at https://github.com/chongshengzhang/OracleBone.