Ancient Yi Script Handwriting Sample Repository.

Abstract

The ancient Yi script has been used for over 8000 years, which can be ranked with Oracle,Sumerian,Egyptian,Mayan and Harappan,and is one of the six ancient scripts in the world. In this article, we collected 2922 handwritten single word samples of commonly used ancient Yi characters. Each character was written by 310 people respectively, with a total of 427,939 valid characters. We completed continuous handwritten text sampling, written by 250 people, with 5 texts per person, covering topics such as Yi astronomy, geography, rituals, and agriculture. In the process of data collection, we proposed an automatic sampling method for ancient Yi script, and completed the automatic cutting and labeling of handwritten samples. Furthermore, we tested the recognition performance of the sorted data set under different deep learning network models. The results show that ancient Yi script has diverse shape structures and rich writing styles, which can be used as a benchmark data set in related fields such as handwritten text recognition and handwritten text generation.