Qumran Letter Restoration by Rotation and Reflection Modified PixelCNN

Abstract

The task of restoring fragmentary letters is fundamental to the reading of ancient manuscripts. We present a method to complete broken letters in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is based on PixelCNN++. Since the generation of the broken letters is conditioned on the extant scroll, we modify the original method to allow reconstructions in multiple directions. Results on both simulated data and real scrolls demonstrate the advantage of our method over the baseline. The implementation may be found at https://github.com/ghostcow/pixel-cnn-qumran.