Automatic Segmentation of Oracle Bone Inscriptions Using YOLOv8

Abstract

Oracle bones inscription is an important part of Chinese cultural heritage, and the automatic segmentation technology of oracle bones is of great significance to promote the research of oracle bones. The main challenges for automatic segmentation of oracle bone inscriptions include the interference of complex backgrounds, the extraction of text regions of tiny sizes, and the problems of noise and cracks in images, which are hard to deal with using traditional image processing and machine learning techniques. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, especially the breakthrough of deep learning and convolutional neural network (CNN) in image recognition, new solutions are provided for automatic segmentation of oracle bone inscriptions. In this paper, we introduce the YOLOv8 model to the automatic segmentation task of oracle bone images. The experimental results show that the YOLOv8 model achieves satisfactory performance in this task, which verifies the effectiveness of advanced deep learning models, and may provide technical support for the digitization and cultural inheritance of oracle bones in future work.