Essay: New Method for Extracting Characters from Sumerian Cuneiform Tablets



Abstract: This paper proposed a new method to extract characters from Sumerian Texts in Sumerian cuneiform tablets from the Ur III period. The work was confronted by the challenges posed by the fact that Sumerian is not a well understood language and it is not similar to any other ancient or modern language, so we offered a new method for extracting characters from Sumerian tablets,

it has an accurate results and better time consuming than other methods, taking many tablet images and applying preprocessing methods to enhance and segment the image and then discrete wavelet transformation and we extract characters for each tablet image by split region algorithm, this work will be very helpful to  Cuneiforms and scholars in their field.

Keywords: Sumerian Texts, discrete wavelet transformation, Sumerian tablets, Features extract.

Introduction

Sumerians an advanced people at their time which their origin still a theory till now, these great men establish a marvelous civilization in  Mesopotamia (The Land between the Rivers), they have great contributions in the Humanity progress along all times, due to their advanced technology at their time they needed a way to record their achievements, victories, their Gods and Heroes, all of that must be recorded , so the invent the first character their first hand written that ever made by human, this system of writing they invented is known as cuneiform texts which are written on tablets mostly clay tablets, along a 30 centuries this system is used and invested in other civilization like Acadian Eelam, Babylonian, Assyrian and other great civilization[1].

At most Mesopotamian tables have two axes of organization: the horizontal axis to categorized numerical information, and the vertical axis, which the data are attributed to different individuals or areas [2]. The repetitive character of tablet texts is useful for explaining the Sumerian sentences and formulas [3].

In the research are mainly used Meaning of Sumerian texts and the way of their readings from the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) [4], Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (PSD) [5].

In the next section we will discuss the main methods used to read and understand the cuneiform texts off course with their advantage and their disadvantages

METHODS AND MATERIALS

Reading cuneiform symbols is an important subject for understanding cuneiform tablets contents. Cuneiformists have used two main techniques to represent and archive cuneiform tablets:

Hand-Drawn Copies (Autographs)

The traditional registration of inscribed tablets and sealing is done with pencil, caliper and millimeter paper. Trained scholars meticulously measure and copy every detail of the original onto a line drawing, method success can achieved by those who have a thorough knowledge of the specific epigraphy of the script and/or iconography [6]. Disadvantages that its manually drawing autographs is a laborious, time consuming, error-prone, and highly subjective process requiring direct access to the tablets. The entire process is obviously slow, delicate, expensive, tedious, and, in the end, unproductive, because the Cuneiformists must travel for long distance from its home to read a tablet because they kept in certain places such museums in London, Iraq, Pennsylvania etc. and also the Cuneiformists must travel again to compare other readings and there is a wide variety in reading and drawings of texts between Scholar's [7].

3D Methods

3D method scans the tablet from all its sides because the tablets and cuneiform letters are in 3D (Digital Preservation of Ancient Cuneiform Tablets Using 3D-Scanning) as shown in Figure 1, its good method to get the texts, over the years, several solutions are proposed aiming to obtain a complete 3D model of artifacts [8]. But it also has disadvantages such time consuming hardware problem software of scanning 3D tablets hardware is also so complex and need professional technical support some the scanning need a technician with some domain expert, but the main target of the scanning is to read the texts not all other properties of the tablet the Scholar also need to travel long distance to the depots or the museums where the 3D are stored in it [9] [10].

Figure1: 3D impressions of the wedges in the clay, and the writing streams extending onto the side of the tablet.

Wavelet Analysis

Wavelet analysis represents a windowing technique with Variables sized regions. Wavelet analysis allows the use of long time intervals where more accurate low frequency information is needed, and shorter regions where high frequency information is needed [11].

The advantage preferred by wavelet is the ability to perform local analysis which is" analyzing a localized area of a larger signal”. Wavelet analysis is capable of revealing aspects of data that other signal analysis techniques couldn't, aspects like self-similarity, trends, discontinuities in higher derivatives, and breakdown points. Further, because it affords a different view of data than those presented by traditional techniques, wavelet analysis can often de-noise a signal or compress it without appreciable degradation [12].

Wavelet analysis can be applied to two-dimensional data images; and, in principle, to higher-dimensional data, the wavelet transform has gained widespread acceptance in signal processing and image compression. Wavelets are obtained from a single prototype wavelet called mother wavelet by dilations and shifting [8]. The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has been introduced as a highly efficient and flexible method for sub band decomposition of signal [13].

Two-dimensional basis consists of a two-dimensional scaling function.

├  }………(1)

Where And   are called horizontal, vertical, diagonal wavelets, respectively, and one separable 2-D scaling function see Figure 2 [12].

The approximations are the high-scale, low-frequency components of the signal. The details are the low-scale, high-frequency components. The filtering process, at its most basic level, looks like in figure2:

Figure 2: The filtering process

Wavelet Reconstruction

DWT may have a certain job that is it can be used to analyze, or decompose, signals and images. But how those components can be assembled back into the original signal with no loss of information is to think now. This operation is called synthesis or reconstruction. The mathematical manipulation that effects synthesis is called the inverse discrete wavelet transforms (IDWT) [13].

Region Splitting Technique

Region splitting technique is one of the Region-Based Segmentation (RBS); the objective of other techniques of segmentation is to partition an image into regions, but RBS techniques are based on finding the regions directly. An image is split initially into four disjoint quadrants, disjoint regions and then merge and/or split the regions in an attempt to satisfy the conditions of segmentation

Proposed Sumerian Character Extraction Methods

The benefit of the image processing is we take an input image in our case is the tablet image which may has several problems such as being broken in some parts or some characters is destroyed by several factors, sometimes the tablets are stolen or missed and only their images are exist.

In this paper we enhanced an algorithm to help solving many problems that the tablets as shown in figure3:

Figure 3: The Stages Involved in the Proposed Method

RESULTS

Our offered algorithm was tested on Matlab 2015b; we took 20 images from CDLI Cuneiform library at Cornell University as shown in figure 4. Figure5 illustrated the results of our proposed system.

(a) (b) (c)

Figure 4: The results of our proposed method: a) original image, b) Wavelet image, c) some extracted characters

Figure 5: Characters Extracted from all 20 Tablets by using our proposed system

DISCUSSION

Our proposed system obviously from figure5 succeeds to extract Sumerian characters separable from Sumerian texts that are written in the clay tablet. Also, we are introduced the first research in this field and we are proposed a new method. The extract characters will be used in other stage of our proposed system to recognition and identification.

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CONCLUSION

Sumerian language due it is the earliest known written language it’s really hard to be read and understand it is not similar to any other language whether the language was ancient or modern, in this research we provide scholars and cuneiforms with the best help they can have its better to the cuneiforms to take an image from a university website library and use our method to extract characters from Sumerian texts.

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REFERENCE

Samual N. Kramer "The Sumerians", The University of Chicago Press, Published 1963.

E. Robson, “Tables and tabular formatting in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, 2500 BCE–50 CE,” in The History Of Mathematical Tablets: From Sumer to Spreadsheet, (eds.) Oxford, pp.19-48, 2003.

G. Spada, “Two Old Babylonian Model Contracts,” University of Rome (Sapienza), Cuneiform Digital Library journal, March 24,2014.

ePSD, “Tthe Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project,”. Available at: http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/index.html, last visited January 15, 2015.

CDLI, “the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative”. Available at: http://cdli.ucla.edu/ last visited January 15, 2015

H. Hameeuw and G. Willems, “New Visualization Techniques for Cuneiform Texts and Sealings, Akkadica,” vol.132 no. 2, , pp. 163-178,2011.

Vandecasteele C., Van L., K. Van, Rompay J. and Wambacq, P., “Digitizing The Cuneiform Tablets From Beydar,” in Images and Artifacts of the Ancient World, Bowman, A. and M. Brady (Eds.), London, pp. 85-96,2005.

Subodh Kumar, Dean Snyder, Donald Duncan, Jonathan Cohen, Jerry Cooper " Digital Preservation of Ancient Cuneiform Tablets Using 3D-Scanning" Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD,2003 USA,

Hahn D., Baldwin K. and Duncan D., “Non-Laser-Based Scanner for Three-Dimensional Digitization of Historical Artifacts,” Applied Optics, vol. 46 no. 15, 20 May, pp. 2838-2850, 2005.

Kantel J., Damerow P., Köhler S. and Tsouparopoulou C., “3D-Scans von Keilschrifttafeln – ein Werkstattbericht,” Assmann, W., Hausmann-Jamin, Ch. and Malisius, F. (Hrsg.), 26. DV-Treffen der Max-Planck-Instituut, 22.-24. Göttingen, 41-62, 2010.

Raed Majeed, Zou Beiji, Hiyam Hatem,1 and Jumana Waleed   " Ancient Cuneiform Text Extraction Based on Automatic Wavelet Selection" School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, pp.253-264, 2015 China

Tzu-Heng Henry Lee" Wavelet Analysis for Image Processing" Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, 2009 ROC

Gonzalez Woods & Eddin McGraw "Digital Image Processing Using Matlab", Hill Education, 2013

Biography

Moahaimen Talib was born at 1979 in Baghdad, graduated from Al-Rafiedien University College. Computer Sci, Dept.2002. Recently, he is in research year of MSc.  

Prof.Dr.Jamila was born at 1966 in Baghdad. She was graduated from Baghdad Uni. Ph.D. in 2001, from Al-Mustansiriyah Uni. M.Sc. in 1996 and B.Sc. in1989. Her interested in theoretical fields and analysis of; image processing, data compression, digital signal processing, Pattern Recognition, and multimedia systems. https://scholar.google.com/citations.