Ownership stamp character recognition system based on ancient character typeface

Abstract

In the process of digital archive development of Asian ancient books, ownership stamps and the annotations should be retrievable to provide the origin and versions of the books and the important support of book collection culture. The development of ownership stamp image databases, the text in the ownership stamp, and the background description of the owner will not only narrow the gap between non-professionals and seal culture and art, but also enable people to know more about ownership stamps, which are types of cultural heritage. Meanwhile, it also provides a convenient comparison and reference tool for professional scholars. However, the variety of the written languages used on ownership stamps and the various layouts of the texts and patterns create difficulties for developing such a database. Most of the existing ownership stamp databases have manually created character illustrations for the entire content of the ownership stamp image, but usually no information for the location of the characters that appear in the images, which cause difficulties for non-professional scholars to understand the ancient characters and unknown character sculptural information. Through the usage of a font database, we propose an ancient character ownership stamp database retrieval support system, which will enable users to unscramble the characters of ownership stamps.