Study on the evolution of Chinese characters based on few-shot learning: From oracle bone inscriptions to regular script

Abstract

Oracle bone inscriptions (OBIs) are ancient Chinese scripts originated in the Shang Dynasty of China, and now less than half of the existing OBIs are well deciphered. To date, interpreting OBIs mainly relies on professional historians using the rules of OBIs evolution, and the remaining part of the oracle’s deciphering work is stuck in a bottleneck period. Here, we systematically analyze the evolution process of oracle characters by using the Siamese network in Few-shot learning (FSL). We first establish a dataset containing Chinese characters which have finished a relatively complete evolution, including images in five periods: oracle bone inscriptions, bronze inscriptions, seal inscriptions, official script, and regular script. Then, we compare the performance of three typical algorithms, VGG16, ResNet, and AlexNet respectively, as the backbone feature extraction network of the Siamese network. The results show that the highest F1 value of 83.3% and the highest recognition accuracy of 82.67% are obtained by the combination of VGG16 and Siamese network. Based on the analysis, the typical structural performance of each period is evaluated and we identified that the optimized Siamese network is feasible to study the evolution of the OBIs. Our findings provide a new approach for oracle’s deciphering further.