PergaNet: A Deep Learning Framework for Automatic Appearance-Based Analysis of Ancient Parchment Collections

Archival institutions and program worldwide work to ensure that the records of governments, organizations, communities and individuals be preserved for the next generations as cultural heritage, as sources of rights, and to hold the past accountable. The digitalization of ancient written documents made of parchment were an important communication mean to humankind and have an invaluable historical value to our culture heritage (CH). Automatic analysis of parchments has become an important research topic in fields of image and pattern recognition. Moreover, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its subset Deep Learning (DL) have been receiving increasing attention in pattern representation. Interest in applying AI to ancient image data analysis is becoming mandatory, and scientists are increasingly using it as a powerful, complex, tool for statistical inference. In this paper it is proposed PergaNet a lightweight DL-based system for historical reconstructions of ancient parchments based on appearance-based approaches. The aim of PergaNet is the automatic analysis and processing of huge amount of scanned parchments. This problem has not been properly investigated by the computer vision community yet due to the parchment scanning technology novelty, and it is extremely important for effective data recovery from historical documents whose content is inaccessible due to the deterioration of the parchment. The proposed approach aims at reducing hand-operated analysis and at the same time at using manual annotation as a form of continuous learning. PergaNet comprises three important phases: classification of parchments recto/verso, the detection of text, then the detection and recognition of the "signum tabellionis". PergaNet concerns not only the recognition and classification of the objects present in the images, but also the location of each of them. The analysis is based on data from the ordinary use and does not involve altering or manipulating techniques in order to generate data.