GPU Based Optical Character Transcription for Ancient Inscription Recognition

Motivated by the challenging questions of todays sinologists we are developing an automated system for processing of ancient Chinese inscriptions (sutras). As these inscriptions are not accessible due to location or damage our input data are noisy images of paper showing the texture of stones together with the inscriptions transfered by charcoal or pencil. Due to the vast amount and large sizes of the images we adopted highly parallelized - and therefore high-performance -- anisotropic filtering using standard computer hardware. Additionally characters are localized/segmented for further processing by optical character recognition. Real results for ancient Chinese inscriptions, which are mimicking non-standardized handwritings are shown.