Study of historical Byzantine seal images: the BHAI project for computer-based sigillography

Abstract

BHAI 1 (Byzantine Hybrid Artificial Intelligence) is the first project based on artificial intelligence dedicated to Byzantine seals. The scientific consortium comprises a multidisciplinary team involving historians specialized in the Byzantine period, specialists in sigillography, and computer science experts. This article describes the main objectives of this project: data acquisition of seal images, text and iconography recognition, seal dating, as well as our current achievements and first results on character recognition and spatial analysis of personages.