https://j.people.com.cn/n3/2026/0713/c95952-20477055.html

AI has become a “new colleague” for archaeologists, contributing to solving many problems. Not only can it recognize letters, piece together fragments, and find wells, but it can even make the Tang Sancai figurines speak humorous lines.

The process from when bamboo and wooden tablets are unearthed to when they are deciphered involves a lot of complicated work, such as cleaning, infrared scanning, character recognition, adding punctuation marks, and joining fragments together. When faced with a huge amount of material, many of the tasks actually have no end in sight. In June 2024, a “Janp academic resource data sharing platform”  began official operation, and has recorded more than 40,000 digital resources from the Han Dynasty in the northwest region. In collaboration with the Jiandu Museum, the world’s first large-scale dataset specializing in Jiandu character recognition was released.This system integrates dispersed infrared images, decoded texts, and multimodal information, and provides highly accurate annotations to enable AI to learn Jiandu characters.

The AI ​​can quickly detect each letter on the tablet, surround it with a frame, and mark the missing parts, eliminating the need for researchers to manually specify each letter one by one. Next is character recognition and decoding support functions. For unclear characters, AI presents multiple candidate characters and their probabilities. Character detection accuracy is currently over 92%, and researchers can prioritize candidates with high probability, greatly improving the efficiency of decoding difficult-to-read characters. Additionally, there are image enhancement and intelligent search functions. In addition to being able to sharpen faded strokes, AI also supports “image search,” allowing it to quickly find similar glyph shapes from a database of tens of thousands of characters. This often serves as an important clue in the process of joining fragmented snails.