Abstract:
"
Inscriptions are a great source of information revealing history. Reading of inscriptions
which is also known as epigraphy can only be done by professional epigraphists. It was
also revealed that currently epigraphy on ancient Sinhala inscriptions are totally
dependent on the knowledge and experience of the epigraphists and there is no
possibility for the other interested parties to read inscriptions due to the lack of literacy
on inscription characters. The proposed system in this research will aid in the process
of epigraphy for epigraphists and overcomes the barrier for reading inscriptions for
history enthusiasts. For this research an inscription character image dataset was created
and used to train a deep learning model which can recognise ancient inscription
characters and translate to modern Sinhala characters. In the proposed system
inscription images are extensively pre-processed to reduce image noise present in
inscriptions. The system has the ability to recognise characters from estampages of
inscriptions itself and translate to modern Sinhala characters. The system was able to
successfully recognise characters with varied levels of image noises and translate to
modern Sinhala characters. "
