EpiAgent: An Agent-Centric System for Ancient Inscription Restoration

Ancient inscriptions frequently suffer missing or corrupted regions from fragmentation, erosion, or other damage, hindering reading, and analysis. We review prior image restoration methods and their applicability to inscription image recovery, then introduce MESA (Multi-Exemplar, Style-Aware) -an image-level restoration method that uses well-preserved exemplar inscriptions (from the same epigraphic monument, material, or similar letterforms) to guide reconstruction of damaged text. MESA encodes VGG19 convolutional features as Gram matrices to capture exemplar texture, style, and stroke structure; for each neural network layer it selects the exemplar minimizing Mean-Squared Displacement (MSD) to the damaged input. Layer-wise contribution weights are derived from Optical Character Recognition-estimated character widths in the exemplar set to bias filters toward scales matching letter geometry, and a training mask preserves intact regions so synthesis is restricted to damaged areas. We also summarize prior network architectures and exemplar and single-image synthesis, inpainting, and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approaches, highlighting limitations that MESA addresses. Comparative experiments demonstrate the advantages of MESA. Finally, we provide a practical roadmap for choosing restoration strategies given available exemplars and metadata.

Ancient script image restoration is a fundamental problem in computer vision, as it directly affects the reliable analysis and interpretation of historical documents and inscriptions. Ashokan Brahmi is an ancient script extensively used during the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC, primarily for inscriptions in Prakrit. These inscriptions, including major and minor rock and pillar edicts, constitute a valuable yet largely unexplored source of data for computational analysis. The degraded nature of inscription imagery and the lack of standardized digital resources pose significant challenges for automated processing. We present an end-to-end AI-based framework for understanding ancient inscriptions that encompasses image enhancement, optical character recognition (OCR), transliteration, and neural machine translation (NMT). The proposed pipeline processes low-quality images captured directly from stone inscriptions, performs image restoration and Brahmi script character recognition, maps the recognized characters to the Roman script, and finally translates the resulting Prakrit text into English. We also introduce two new datasets: (i) InscriptionOCR Dataset: the largest publicly usable digital OCR dataset for Brahmi script to date, consisting of over 200,000 character images across about 600 classes, and (ii) a bilingual Prakrit-English parallel corpus comprising over 2,000 sentence pairs for NMT. We believe that the proposed framework and datasets will facilitate future research in ancient script analysis, low-resource OCR, and digital epigraphy.

Full-page blind restoration of historical Manchu manuscripts is challenging due to scarce annotations, unknown degradation regions, and fragile connected strokes. Generic restoration models may improve visual quality but often modify intact content, leading to over-restoration. We propose SAGE-Restore (Stroke-Aware Gated rEstoration), a selective restoration framework that first assesses where restoration is needed and then uses this assessment to guide restoration candidate generation and pixel-level selection. Its encoder predicts patch-level repair probabilities from complementary appearance and stroke-structural cues to condition restoration candidate generation, while the corresponding repair logits are refined into a pixel-level soft gate that selectively controls where the restoration candidate is applied. We further introduce a fidelity-aware evaluation protocol that jointly measures degraded-region recovery, intact-content preservation, and their balance. SAGE-Restore achieves the highest R-Recovery (0.463) and RFS (0.626), while maintaining high U-Fidelity (0.968), demonstrating an effective balance between restoration and content preservation.