A New Topological Method for Examining Historical Inscriptions

The article presents a new method developed to increase the efficiency of the identification algorithm for historical inscriptions of unknown origin. The authors extracted topological properties of the symbols containing different script relics, and analyzed them by using statistical tools. The considered topological properties are circular loop, oblique lines, vertical section, and crossing, among others. The article describes the use of the number of a three-circle grapheme intersection point vectors to identify unknown symbols. The number of intersections of the three circles and the examined symbol is stored in a feature vector. By supplementing the feature vectors with the circle vectors, the authors succeeded in improving the efficiency of the algorithm designed to decipher hard to read historical inscriptions.