Teiresias: A tool for automatic Greek handwriting translation

The term epigraphy refers to the science that studies the written texts (epigraphs) of the different civilizations of the past in the different historical periods to understand the history of the ancient world. Greek epigraphs of the archaic and ancient periods contain many different variations of each symbol; moreover, each of them is often written imperfectly or ruined by time. The goal of epigraphs is to associate these archaic symbols with the correct modern Greek letters. This work is a contribution in the direction of providing ICT facilities in the context of cultural heritage. More specifically, the paper presents a multiclass classifier for the recognition of symbols belonging to the archaic Greek alphabet. The Machine Learning technique used for our classifier is that of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The name chosen for the tool is Teiresias, that in Greek mythology was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years. Teiresias's final aim is helping epigraphists in finding the correct association from an handwritten letter to its correspondent modern Greek letter, and therefore, in a more general context, from an handwritten script to the correspondent modern Greek script.