Restoring Ancient Ideograph: A Multimodal Multitask Neural Network Approach
This work addresses the preservation of cultural heritage for digital humanities by introducing a novel multimodal approach to ancient text restoration, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing deep learning methods for restoration.
The paper tackles the problem of restoring damaged ancient texts, particularly ideographs, by proposing a multimodal multitask neural network that combines visual and textual information to predict missing characters and generate restored images, achieving insightful restoration suggestions in both simulated and real-world experiments.
Cultural heritage serves as the enduring record of human thought and history. Despite significant efforts dedicated to the preservation of cultural relics, many ancient artefacts have been ravaged irreversibly by natural deterioration and human actions. Deep learning technology has emerged as a valuable tool for restoring various kinds of cultural heritages, including ancient text restoration. Previous research has approached ancient text restoration from either visual or textual perspectives, often overlooking the potential of synergizing multimodal information. This paper proposes a novel Multimodal Multitask Restoring Model (MMRM) to restore ancient texts, particularly emphasising the ideograph. This model combines context understanding with residual visual information from damaged ancient artefacts, enabling it to predict damaged characters and generate restored images simultaneously. We tested the MMRM model through experiments conducted on both simulated datasets and authentic ancient inscriptions. The results show that the proposed method gives insightful restoration suggestions in both simulation experiments and real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the pioneering application of multimodal deep learning in ancient text restoration, which will contribute to the understanding of ancient society and culture in digital humanities fields.