SEL-RefineMask: A Seal Segmentation and Recognition Neural Network with SEL-FPN

Digging historical and cultural information from seals in ancient books is of great significance. However, ancient Chinese seal samples are scarce and carving methods are diverse, and traditional digital image processing methods based on greyscale have difficulty achieving superior segmentation and recognition performance. Recently, some deep learning algorithms have been proposed to address this problem; however, current neural networks are difficult to train owing to the lack of datasets. To solve the afore-mentioned problems, we proposed an SEL-RefineMask which combines selector of feature pyramid network (SEL-FPN) with RefineMask to segment and recognize seals. We designed an SEL-FPN to intelligently select a specific layer which represents different scales in the FPN and reduces the number of anchor frames. We performed experiments on some instance segmentation networks as the baseline method, and the top-1 segmentation result of 64.93% is 5.73% higher than that of humans. The top-1 result of the SEL-RefineMask network reached 67.96% which surpassed the baseline results. After segmentation, a vision transformer was used to recognize the segmentation output, and the accuracy reached 91%. Furthermore, a dataset of seals in ancient Chinese books (SACB) for segmentation and small seal font (SSF) for recognition were established which are publicly available on the website.