This repository accompanies the survey Oracle Bone Inscriptions Information Processing: A Comprehensive Survey and systematically organizes benchmarks and resources across oracle bone character recognition, fragment rejoining, classification and retrieval, decipherment, and related multimodal tasks. It aims to serve as a collection for reporting progress in the field of Oracle Bone Inscriptions Processing.
We will continuously maintain and update this repository to ensure long-term value for the community.
Paper: Techrxiv
Project Page: This repository
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Please contact the first author of this paper for queries.
- Zijian Chen,
[email protected]
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If our work is helpful in your research, please cite our survey as:
@article{Chen_2025,
title={Oracle Bone Inscriptions Information Processing: A Comprehensive Survey},
url={http://dx.doi.org/10.22541/au.176616165.50988592/v1},
DOI={10.22541/au.176616165.50988592/v1},
publisher={Wiley},
author={Chen, Zijian and Hua, Wenjie and Li, Jinhao and Zhu, Yucheng and Zhi, Xiaona and Liu, Zhiji and Chen, Tingzhu and Zhang, Wenjun and Zhai, Guangtao},
year={2025}- Oracle Bone Inscriptions Information Processing: A Comprehensive Survey
| Dataset | Paper | Project Page |
|---|---|---|
| YinQiWenYuan_detection | YinQiWenYuan: Oracle Bone Character Detection Dataset | Website |
| OracleBone-8000 | AI-Powered Oracle Bone Inscriptions Recognition and Fragments Rejoining | N/A |
| ACCID | Toward Zero-shot Character Recognition: A Gold Standard Dataset with Radical-level Annotations | N/A |
| O2BR | OBI-Bench: Can LMMs Aid in Study of Ancient Script on Oracle Bones? | Github |
This section provides a task-oriented index of OBI Processing Tasks and Approaches papers, aligned with the task taxonomy used in this survey (Section 4 of our paper).
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| A Method of Jia Gu Wen Recognition Based on a Two-level Classification | ICDAR 1995 | Two-level classification, topological structure |
| Recognition of Oracular Bone Inscriptions Using Template Matching | IJCTE 2016 | Four-directional scanning, template matching |
| Oracle-Bone Inscriptions Recognition Based on Topological Features | CSA 2019 | Topological feature points, connected domains |
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| The Research on Rejoining of the Oracle Bone Rubbings Based on Curve Matching | TALLIP 2021 | Partial-to-global curve matching |
| Research on Key Technologies of the Computer Aided Rejoining of Oracle Bone Inscriptions | ICIFE 2010 | Freeman chain code, contour matching |
| System Design for Computer Aided Rejoining of Bones/Tortoise Shells with Inscriptions Based on Contour Matching | ICCCT 2010 | Shape function–based contour matching |
| AI-powered Oracle Bone Inscriptions Recognition and Fragments Rejoining | IJCAI 2020 | Time-series modeling of contour curves |
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Internal Similarity Network for Rejoining Oracle Bone Fragment Images | Symmetry 2022 | Internal similarity pooling network |
| SFF-Siam: A New Oracle Bone Rejoining Method Based on Siamese Network | IEEE CG&A 2023 | Siamese network with similarity feature fusion |
| Data-driven Oracle Bone Rejoining: A Dataset and Practical Self-supervised Learning Scheme | KDD 2022 | Self-supervised learning, dataset-driven |
| OBD-Finder: Explainable Coarse-to-Fine Text-Centric Oracle Bone Duplicates Discovery | arXiv 2025 | Duplicate discovery, coarse-to-fine matching |
| A multi-modal dataset and method for bone-level association prediction in oracle bone inscriptions | npj heritage science 2026 | multi-modal deep learning method |
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| OracleGCD: Generalized Category Discovery for Oracle Bone Scripts | ICDAR 2025 | Generalized category discovery |
| Ora-NSC: A Novel Semi-supervised Approach for Oracle Bone Fragment Classification with Imbalanced Classes | ACM MM Asia 2025 | Semi-supervised learning |
| OBI-CMF: Self-supervised Learning with Contrastive Masked Frequency Modeling for Oracle Bone Inscription Recognition | npj Heritage Science 2025 | Self-supervised contrastive learning |
| Linking Unknown Characters via Oracle Bone Inscriptions Retrieval | Multimedia Systems 2024 | Unknown character retrieval |
| RZCR: Zero-shot Character Recognition via Radical-based Reasoning | IJCAI 2023 | Radical-based zero-shot reasoning |
| Component-level Oracle Bone Inscription Retrieval | ICMR 2024 | Component-level retrieval |
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Unsupervised Structure-Texture Separation Network for Oracle Character Recognition | IEEE TIP 2022 | Structure–texture disentanglement |
| OracleAgent: A Multimodal Reasoning Agent for Oracle Bone Script Research | arXiv 2025 | Vision–text retrieval, agentic system |
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Making Visual Sense of Oracle Bones for You and Me | CVPR 2024 | Human study on visual grounding of oracle glyphs |
| V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones | ACL 2025 | VQA-based progressive visual reasoning |
| OracleFusion: Assisting the Decipherment of Oracle Bone Script with Structurally Constrained Semantic Typography | ICCV 2025 | LMM-based visual alignment with structure constraints |
| PictOBI-20k: Unveiling Large Multimodal Models in Visual Decipherment | arXiv 2025 | Visual perception benchmark for pictographic OBI |
| Paper | Venue & Year | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| OBI-Bench: Can LMMs Aid in Study of Ancient Script on Oracle Bones? | ICLR 2025 | Systematic evaluation of LMM-based oracle interpretation |
| OracleSage: Towards Unified Visual-Linguistic Understanding of Oracle Bone Scripts | arXiv 2024 | Cross-modal reasoning with knowledge fusion |
| Interpretable Oracle Bone Script Decipherment through Radical and Pictographic Analysis with LVLMs | arXiv 2025 | LVLM-based interpretable decipherment |
| OracleAgent: A Multimodal Reasoning Agent for Oracle Bone Script Research | arXiv 2025 | Agentic system for structured oracle interpretation |