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Project Background

Inscriptions are used as resources for studying the ancient history of any country of the world. Recognizing the content in the ancient inscriptions unlocks many gateways to the undiscovered historical events since inscriptions were used as a major communication mechanism in ancient Sri Lanka. Brahmi script is one of the most important ancient letters in South Asia. It became the matrix of Devanagari characters used for Sanskrit and Hindi. With the aid of modern techniques of computer image processing, precise alphabet fonts of early Brahmi scripts have been produced from photographic data of ancient Sri Lankan inscriptions. According to the facts found through the researchers and research papers, it is clear that there is a huge gap between Archeology and modern technology.

Therefore, archeologists still follow manual procedures to get their work done. The recognition and translation of handwritten characters that were written without constraints are challenging. Currently, these inscriptions are read through the naked human eye with great effort. This manual process is not only time-consuming but also can generate certain outputs sometimes due to the noise that is available in the inscriptions. As this way cost a huge amount of cost and a huge amount of effort it’s better to propose a systematic way to solve this problem.

Aim of the Project

This project aims to provide a systematic solution to recognize the characters in ancient Sri Lankan inscriptions and translate them into Sinhala and other native languages. This solution will be mainly focused on the Brahmi inscriptions which include early Brahmi to later Brahmi period.