Oracle bone script (OBS) is the earliest writing system in China, which is of great value in the improvement of archaeology and Chinese cultural history. However, there are some problems such as the lack of labels and the difficulty to distinguish the glyphs from the background of OBS, which makes the automatic recognition of OBS in the real world not achieve the satisfactory effect. In this paper, we propose a character recognition method based on an unsupervised domain adaptive network (UFCNet). Firstly, a convolutional attention fusion module (CAFM) is designed in the encoder to obtain more global features through multi-layer feature fusion. Second, we construct a Fourier transform (FT) module that focuses on the differences between glyphs and backgrounds. Finally, to further improve the network’s ability to recognize character edges, we introduce a kernel norm-constrained loss function. Extensive experiments perform on the Oracle-241 dataset show that the proposed method is superior to other adaptive methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhouynan/UFCNet.

Due to ancient origin, there are many incomplete characters in the unearthed Oracle Bone Inscriptions(OBI), which brings the great challenges to recognition and research. In recent years, image inpainting techniques have made remarkable progress. However, these models are unable to adapt to the unique font shape and complex text background of OBI. To meet these aforementioned challenges, we propose a two-stage method for restoring damaged OBI using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which incorporates a dual discriminator structure to capture both global and local image information. In order to accurately restore the image structure and details, the spatial attention mechanism and a novel loss function are proposed. By feeding clear copies of existing OBI and various types of masks into the network, it learns to generate content for the missing regions. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in completing OBI compared to several state-of-the-art techniques.