Papy-S-Net: A Siamese Network to match papyrus fragments

Abstract

Like all heritage documents, papyri are the subject of an in-depth study by scientists. While large volumes of papyri have been digitized and indexed, many are still waiting to be so. It takes time to study a papyrus mainly because they are rarely available in one piece. Papyrologists must review a large number of fragments, find those that go together and then assemble them to finally analyze the text. Unfortunately, some fragments no longer exist. It is then a time consuming puzzle to solve, where not all the pieces are available and where fragments boundaries are not perfectly matching.AB@This article describes a method to help Papyrologists save time by helping them to solve this complex puzzle. We provide a solution where an expert use a fragment as a request element and get fragments that belong to the same papyrus. The main contribution is the proposal of a deep siamese network architecture, called Papy-S-Net for Papyrus-Siamese-Network, designed for papyri fragment matching. This network is trained and validated on 500 papyrus fragments approx. We compare the results of Papy-S-Net with a previous work of Koch et al. [14] which proposes a siamese network to match written symbols. In order to train and validate the network, we proceed to the extraction of patches from the papyrus fragments to create our ground truth. Papy-S-Net outperforms Koch et al.'s network. We also evaluate our approach on a real use case on which Papy-S-Net achieves 79% of correct matches.