Ancient Character Recognition: A Novel Image Dataset of Shui Manuscript Characters and Classification Model

Shui manuscripts are part of the national intangible cultural heritage of China. Owing to the particularity of text reading, the level of informatization and intelligence in the protection of Shui manuscript culture is not adequate. To address this issue, this study created Shuishu_C, the largest image dataset of Shui manuscript characters that has been reported. Furthermore, after extensive experimental validation, we proposed ShuiNet-A, a lightweight artificial neural network model based on the attention mechanism, which combines channel and spatial dimensions to extract key features and finally recognize Shui manuscript characters. The effectiveness and stability of ShuiNet-A were verified through multiple sets of experiments. Our results showed that, on the Shui manuscript dataset with 113 categories, the accuracy of ShuiNet-A was 99.8%, which is 1.5% higher than those of similar studies. The proposed model could contribute to the classification accuracy and protection of ancient Shui manuscript characters.