HWOBC-A Handwriting Oracle Bone Character Recognition Database

Abstract The oracle bone character (OBC) from ancient China is the most famous ancient writing systems around the world. Identifying and deciphering OBCs is one of the most important topics in oracle bone study. In research, one of the challenges is that the literature review usually leads to a huge cost of time and manpower. Therefore, the digitazation of OBC literature through the automatic recognition is the inevitable trend of future development. However, the OBCs in the literature are usually writing characters while the database of handwriting OBC has not yet been presented. In this paper, we establish a handwriting oracle bone character database called HWOBC, containing 83,245 character-level samples which are grouped into 3881-character categories. We also present the performance of several baseline DCNN-based methods, in which Melnyk-Net exhibits the best accuracy of 97.64%. It is anticipated that the publication of this database will facilitate the development of OBC research.