Applications of Convolutional Neural Networks to Extracting Oracle Bone Inscriptions from Three-Dimensional Models

Abstract

In recent years, high-fidelity three-dimensional (3D) oracle bone models (3D-OBMs) have received extensive attention from oracle bone experts due to their unparalleled reducibility to real oracle bone. In the research process of 3D-OBMs, the first procedure is to extract oracle bone inscriptions (OBIs) from the model to form individual oracle bone characters (OBCs). However, the manual extraction of OBIs is a time-consuming and labor-intensive task that relies heavily on oracle bone knowledge. To address these problems, we propose a texture-mapping-based OBI extractor (tm-OBIE), which leverages the symmetrical characteristics of the texture mapping process and is able to extract 3D-OBIs from 3D-OBMs saved as a wavefront file. The OBIs in the texture file were first located using a trained 2D object detector. After that, the 3D mesh area, where the OBIs are located, was obtained using an inverse texture mapping method. Thirdly, a specific 2D plane was fitted using the centroid of triangular faces in the flat regions of the mesh via a singular value decomposition (SVD) method. Finally, by measuring the distances between the triangle meshes and the fitted plane, the meshes of the 3D-OBIs were obtained. This paper verifies the feasibility of this method via experiments and analyzes the possibility of using the algorithm framework for extracting other ancient characters from their corresponding 3D models.