OraclePoints: A Hybrid Neural Representation for Oracle Character

Oracle Bone Inscriptions (OBI) are ancient hieroglyphs originated in China and are considered one of the most famous writing systems in the world. Up to now, thousands of OBIs have been discovered, which require deciphering by experts to understand their contents. Experts typically need to restore, classify, and compare each character with previous inscriptions. Although existing research can assist with one of these operations, their performance falls short of practical requirements. In this work, we propose the OraclePoints framework, which represents OBI images as hybrid neural representations comprising features of images and point sets. The image representation provides inscription appearance and character structure, while the point representation makes it easy and effective to distinguish characters and noises. In addition, we demonstrate that OraclePoints can be easily integrated with existing models in a plug-and-play manner. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed hybrid neural representation framework supports a range of OBI tasks, including character image retrieval, recognition, and denoising. It is also demonstrated that OraclePoints is helpful for deciphering OBIs by linking ancient characters to modern Chinese characters. Our codes are available at https://ddghjikle.github.io/.