Eugen Rusakov, Turna Somel, Gerfrid G. W. Mueller and Gernot A. Fink
Proc. Int. Conf. on Document Analysis and Recognition, 2021.
Lausanne, Switzerland
In the document analysis community, intermediate represen- tations based on binary attributes are used to perform retrieval tasks or recognize unseen categories. These visual attributes representing high- level semantics continually achieve state-of-the-art results, especially for the task of word spotting. While spotting tasks are mainly performed on Latin or Arabic scripts, the cuneiform writing system is still a less well-known domain for the document analysis community. In contrast to the Latin alphabet, the cuneiform writing system consists of many different signs written by pressing a wedge stylus into moist clay tablets. Cuneiform signs are defined by different constellations and relative po- sitions of wedge impressions, which can be exploited to define sign rep- resentations based on visual attributes. A promising approach of repre- senting cuneiform sign using visual attributes is based on the so-called Gottstein-System. Here, cuneiform signs are described by counting the wedge types from a holistic perspective without any spatial information for wedge positions within a sign. We extend this holistic representation by a spatial pyramid approach with a more fine-grained description of cuneiform signs. In this way, the proposed representation is capable of describing a single sign in a more detailed way and represent a more extensive set of sign categories.