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Analyzing Ancient Maya Glyph Collections with Contextual Shape Descriptors

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Abstract

This paper presents an original approach for shape-based analysis of ancient Maya hieroglyphs based on an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer vision and archeology. Our work is guided by realistic needs of archaeologists and scholars who critically need support for search and retrieval tasks in large Maya imagery collections. Our paper has three main contributions. First, we introduce an overview of our interdisciplinary approach towards the improvement of the documentation, analysis, and preservation of Maya pictographic data. Second, we present an objective evaluation of the performance of two state-of-the-art shape-based contextual descriptors (Shape Context and Generalized Shape Context) in retrieval tasks, using two datasets of syllabic Maya glyphs. Based on the identification of their limitations, we propose a new shape descriptor named Histogram of Orientation Shape Context (HOOSC), which is more robust and suitable for description of Maya hieroglyphs. Third, we present what to our knowledge constitutes the first automatic analysis of visual variability of syllabic glyphs along historical periods and across geographic regions of the ancient Maya world via the HOOSC descriptor. Overall, our approach is promising, as it improves performance on the retrieval task, has been successfully validated under an epigraphic viewpoint, and has the potential of offering both novel insights in archeology and practical solutions for real daily scholar needs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Idiap Research Institute, 1920, Martigny, Switzerland

    Edgar Roman-Rangel, Jean-Marc Odobez & Daniel Gatica-Perez

  2. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Edgar Roman-Rangel, Jean-Marc Odobez & Daniel Gatica-Perez

  3. National Anthropology and History Institute of Mexico (INAH), Mexico, Mexico

    Carlos Pallan

Authors
  1. Edgar Roman-Rangel
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  2. Carlos Pallan
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  3. Jean-Marc Odobez
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  4. Daniel Gatica-Perez
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Correspondence to Edgar Roman-Rangel.

Additional information

Part of this work is based on “Retrieving Ancient Maya Glyphs with Shape Context.”, by Edgar Roman-Rangel, Carlos Pallan, Jean-Marc Odobez, Daniel Gatica-Perez, which appeared in Proc. Workshop on eHeritage and Digital Art Preservation, at 12th International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops, Kyoto. © 2009 IEEE.

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Roman-Rangel, E., Pallan, C., Odobez, JM. et al. Analyzing Ancient Maya Glyph Collections with Contextual Shape Descriptors. Int J Comput Vis 94, 101–117 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-010-0387-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-010-0387-x

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