Advancing Ancient Artifact Character Image Augmentation through Styleformer-ART for Sustainable Knowledge Preservation

The accurate detection of ancient artifacts is very crucial in recognizing and tracking the origin of these relics. The methodologies used in engraving characters onto these objects are different from the ones used in the modern era, prompting the need to develop tools that are accurately tailored to detect these characters. The challenge encountered in developing an object character recognition model for this purpose is the lack of sufficient data needed to train these models. In this work, we propose Styleformer-ART to augment the ancient artifact character images. To show the performance of Styleformer-ART, we compared Styleformer-ART with different state-of-the-art data augmentation techniques. To make a conclusion on the best augmentation method for this special dataset, we evaluated all the augmentation methods employed in this work using the Frétchet inception distance (FID) score between the reference images and the generated images. The methods were also evaluated on the recognition accuracy of a CNN model. The Styleformer-ART model achieved the best FID score of 210.72, and Styleformer-ART-generated images achieved a recognition accuracy with the CNN model of 84%, which is better than all the other reviewed image-generation models.