L.I.S.A. - The Hieroglyphics Initiative: an open source digital platform for Egyptology

Can we train a machine to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs? This is
the question the independent production company Psycle explored in
a Ubisoft research project. Taking the facsimiles created by
Egyptologists as our starting point, we created a processing
pipeline that begins with photographs of hieroglyphs in situ, and
ends with possible translations in a modern language. The pipeline
uses computer vision techniques to find candidate glyphs and glyph
groups in an automatically generated facsimile. Next, neural nets
are used to recognise the candidate glyphs and, finally, sequences
of glyphs are compared to dictionaries of glyph words in order to
find possible translations. The lecture discusses not only the
technical challenges of the project, but also highlights the
limitations of machine learning, and the critical importance of the
amount and consistency of data for enterprises of this type. The
engagement and support of the academic community, which was crucial
in giving direction and substance to the project, is also
discussed. The project has generated a research and teaching tool
for Egyptologists, an open-source repository of code, and several
avenues for further research and collaboration. Den Originalbeitrag
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