A Vision-Based Strategy to Segment and Localize Ancient Symbols Written in Stone

Abstract

This work proposes an automatic method to detect ancient symbols written in stone. The proposed method takes into account well-known techniques used in computer vision to identify the contour of the symbols in the image. The two-stage method consists of segmentation and localization processes. Segmentation process includes a pre-processing step, edge detection and thresholding. Localization process is based on two conditions that take into account several parameters, like the distance between points, and the orientation and the continuity of the edges. This proposal has been applied to localize Egyptian cartouches (borders enclosing the name of a king) and stonemason’s marks from images obtained under varying lighting conditions (controlled and natural lighting). The proposed method is compared favorably against other methods based on chain coding, neural networks and statistical correlation. The promising results give new possibilities to identify and recognize complex symbols and ancient texts.