Hubert Mara

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Department of History and Cultural Studies

Motivated by the demand for robust character extraction from ancient documents with Script in 3D like cuneiform tablets, we are are developing curvature based filter algorithms using integral invariants. While previous work was focused on analyzing 3D-models i.e. irregular triangular meshs in R3, we introduce a fast, efficient adaption for edge det...

In the Digital Humanities, text sources can be digitized using various methods resulting in different data representations of related documents. This presents an increased challenge for clay tablets with cuneiform script, which is one of the oldest scripts written by hand, used in the ancient Middle East for more than three millennia. Using a 3D-Sc...

Motivated by the increasing demand for computerized analysis of documents within the Digital Humanities we present an approach to automating handwritten cuneiform character recognition on vectorized cuneiform tablets. Cuneiform is one of the oldest handwritten scripts used for more than three millennia. In previous work we have shown how to extract...

As assyriologists have to handle tremendous amounts of important documents of ancient history written in cuneiform script, like the epic of Gilgamesh, we are developing an efficient system to support their daily tasks. Previous projects demonstrated the application of holography and early close-range 3D scanners for this task. Based on experiences...

As Digital Ancient Near Studies (DANES) and Ancient Language Processing (ALP) require larger volumes of annotated documents , we focus on automatically computed graphical annotations for cuneiform tablets, which are among the oldest documents spanning at least three millennia of human history. Cuneiform consists of wedges imprinted on clay tablets,...

Motivated by the importance of lithic artifacts in the development of our ancestors, this study introduces a novel method combining 3D mesh segmentation and graph modeling to determine relevant features of operational sequences being relevant for the classification of processes of lithic artifacts. A two-part process was employed: first, scar segme...

Motivated by the question of understanding the roots of tool making by anatomically modern humans and coexisting Neanderthals in the Paleolithic, a number of shape classification methods have been tested on photographs and drawings of stone tools. Since drawings contain interpretation and photographs fool both human and computational methods by col...

Motivated by the concept of combining the archaeological practice of creating lithic artifact drawings with the potential of 3D mesh data, our goal in this project is not only to analyze the shape at the artifact level, but also to enable a more detailed analysis of stone tools at the scar and ridge level. For this purpose, we combine the archaeolo...

Motivated by the challenges of the Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES) community, we develop digital tools for processing cuneiform script being a 3D script imprinted into clay tablets used for more than three millennia and at least eight major languages. It consists of thousands of characters that have changed over time and space. Photogr...

Motivated by the demands of Digital Assyriology and the challenges of detecting cuneiform signs, we propose a new approach using R-CNN architecture to classify and localize wedges. We utilize the 3D models of 1977 cuneiform tablets from the \emph{Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection} available as pen data. About 500 of these tablets have a transcrip...

In the contemporary archaeological practice, the academic narrative of a lithic artifact begins directly with its excavation from the ground, and ends as a drawing in the catalog of a publication. This drawing was simultaneously enriched with an interpretation of different traces to bring the artifact in shape, but in the process the artifact gets...

This repository contains derivatives of the Open Access publication by Falcucci & Peresani [FP22]. Our derived dataset (n = 62) is used to demonstrate our segmentation algorithm [BHM23], as shown in [BLM22], [BLM23], [LBM23], and will serve as a benchmark dataset for future analyses. To date, and to the best of our knowledge, our dataset is the fir...

This dataset, the Mainz Cuneiform Benchmark Dataset (MaiCuBeDa), contains annotations of cuneiform signs on renderings of 3D models of cuneiform tablets extracted from the HeiCuBeDa dataset and from flatbed scans of the same cuneiform tablets. In particular, this dataset provides image annotations using the W3C Web Annotation Data Model as well as...

Motivated by the challenges of the Digital Ancient Near Eastern Studies (DANES) community, we develop digital tools for processing cuneiform script being a 3D script imprinted into clay tablets used for more than three millennia and at least eight major languages. It consists of thousands of characters that have changed over time and space. Photogr...

The National Museum of Raqqa in Syria has suffered immensely from the ongoing violence since 2011. Much of its valuable collection of movable archaeological heritage (ca. 6000 items) is considered lost. Starting from 500 of the most precious objects of the museum stored in the Raqqa Central Bank and stolen from there in 2013, the pilot project Focu...

Neanderthals and our human ancestors have coexisted for a large period of time sharing many things in common including the production of tools, which are among the few remaining artefacts providing a possible insight into the different paths of evolvement and extinction. These earliest tools were made of stone using different strategies to reduce a...

The dataset consists of 3D scans of one cuneiform tablet from Haft Tappeh Iran and one cuneiform tablet of the Hilprecht Collection as well as 3D annotations on these 3Dmeshes, including metadata. The 3D annotations were created with the annotation software Annotorious2 on 2D renderings and reprojected to the original 3D model. Therespective 2D ren...

Cuneiform tablets appertain to the oldest textual artifacts used for more than three illennia and are comparable in amount and relevance to texts written in Latin or ancient Greek. hese tablets are typically found in the Middle East and were written by imprinting wedge-shaped impressions into wet clay. There is an increasing demand in the Digital H...

The well-known archaic Greek marble head of a bearded man in the Staatliche Museen Berlin, formerly in the collection Sabouroff, is analyzed regarding its lost figure type. A survey of bearded male statues in archaic art shows that originally the head belonged with some probability to a rider, less probably to a seated dignitary. The head‘s asymmet...

Seals and sealings were widely used in Neopalatial Crete, primarily in community-wide administrative systems to manage the movement and storage of goods, but also to secure or control channels of intra-site communication using parchment documents. The main principle of this monitoring process was the use of the seal impression as an ‘indexical’ sig...

Motivated by the increased use of 3D acquisition of objects by cultural heritage institutions, we were investigating ontologies and metadata schemes for the acquisition process to provide details about the 3D capturing, which can be combined with preexisting ontologies describing an object. Therefore we divided the 3D capturing workflow into common...

Near-continuously acquired terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data contains valuable information on natural surface dynamics. An important step in geographic analyses is to detect different types of changes that can be observed in a scene. For this, spatiotemporal segmentation is a time series-based method of surface change analysis that removes the...

Motivated by numerous discussions around the increasing use of research software in the field of archaeology, this article outlines the aspects for its review. The evaluation of software is a complex topic, since its field of application and development context has a considerable influence. In addition, there are many very different use cases, rang...

Geographic observation benefits from the increasing availability of time series of 3D geospatial data, which allow analysis of change processes at high temporal detail and over extensive periods. In this context, the demand for advanced methods to detect and extract topographic surface changes from these 4D geospatial data emerges. Changes in natur...

The Corpus of Minoan and Mycenaean Seals (CMS) in Heidelberg contains records of approximately 12.000 ancient seals and seal impressions. The study of the seals, their engraved motifs, and sealing practices gives valuable insights into the social, political and economic organization of Aegean Bronze Age societies. A key research question is whether...

Clay tablets are the oldest handwritten documents using the cuneiform script named after the wedge shaped imprints of a rectangular stylus left in their surface. Therefore the most suitable documentation technique is 3D acquisition using e.g. structured light. The tablets are heterogeneously shaped and may contain damage in varying degrees. Convolu...

Clay tablets are the oldest handwritten documents using the cuneiform script named after the wedge shaped imprints of a rectangular stylus left in their surface. Therefore the most suitable documentation technique is 3D acquisition using e.g. structured light. The tablets are heterogeneously shaped and may contain damage in varying degrees. Convolu...

Zeitserien von 3D-Punktwolken werden zunehmend für die Beobachtung geomorphologischer Phänomene genutzt. Dieser Beitrag untersucht, wie eine veränderte zeit-liche Auflösung die raumzeitliche Abgrenzung von Oberflächenprozessen beeinflusst. Dazu wird eine Zeitserien-basierte Region Growing Segmentierung verwendet. Die Untersuchung erfolgt am Beispie...

In Bronze Aegean society, seals played an important role by authenticating, securing and marking. The study of the seals and their engraved motifs provides valuable insight into the social and political organization and administration of Aegean societies. A key research question is the determination of authorship and origin. Given several sets of s...

Archaeological projects are often faced with processing unwieldy amounts of ceramic ma- terial on-site. This documentation and analysis has traditionally required hand drawing of diagnostic sherds and vessels, which is extremely time-consuming, especially when faced with complex forms. The Guadalupe Archaeological Project operates in northeast Hond...

Unwrappings are crucial in archaeological pottery studies. Within the study of Greek pottery, unwrappings of painted surfaces have a long tradition and their significance is still well-deserved. They show the depiction without photographic distortions or partitioning in multiple photographs, enabling archaeologists to analyse and interpret the imag...

The number of known cuneiform tablets is assumed to be in the hundreds of thousands. The Hilprecht Archive Online contains 1977 high-resolution 3D scans of tablets. The online cuneiform database CDLI catalogs metadata for more than 100.000 tablets. While both are accessible publicly , large-scale machine learning and pattern recognition on cuneifor...

Geomorphic processes occur spatially variable and at varying magnitudes, frequencies and velocities, which poses a great challenge to current methods of topographic change analysis. For the quantification of surface change, permanent terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) can generate time series of 3D point clouds at high temporal and spatial resolution...

See the full paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338459477_Advanced_Documentation_Methods_in_Studying_Corinthian_Black-figure_Vase_Painting The added value of CT in pottery research is its ability to look into closed vessels and into the material ceramic itself. This allows the computing of profile cuts and visualisations of the i...

Archaeological research into Aegean sealings and sigils reveals valuable insights into the Aegean socio-political organization and administration. An important question arising is the determination of authorship and origin of seals. The similarity of sealings is a key factor as it can indicate different seals with the same depiction or the same sea...

Video Version of the poster at Youtube: https://youtu.be/155zXG9eyg4 and published via HeiDOK: http://doi.org/10.11588/heidok.00025189 Full paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338459477_Advanced_Documentation_Methods_in_Studying_Corinthian_Black-figure_Vase_Painting Best-Poster-Award at the CHNT 23.

Increased use of 3D digitization methods leads to large numbers of 3D models with script like cuneiform tablets, temple wall inscriptions from the Mayan empire and Minoan and Mycenaean seal imprints. Analyzing and in particular comparing those objects in our projects is a core challenge for robust symbol-spotting and transcription of ancient script...

Increased use of 3D digitization methods leads to large numbers of 3D models with script like cuneiform tablets, temple wall inscriptions from the Mayan empire and Minoan and Mycenaean seal imprints. Analyzing and in particular comparing those objects in our projects is a core challenge for robust symbol-spotting and transcription of ancient script...

Cuneiform tablets appertain to the oldest textual artifacts used for more than three millennia and are comparable in amount and relevance to texts written in Latin or ancient Greek. We present a complete digital analysis workflow enabling modern text processing on the complex and non-linear script. Our tools encompass the whole pipeline, from digit...

Cuneiform tablets appertain to the oldest tex-tual artifacts used for more than three millennia and are comparable in amount and relevance to texts written in Latin or ancient Greek. We present a complete digital analysis workflow enabling modern text processing on the complex and non-linear script. Our tools encompass the whole pipeline, from digi...

On this poster, we present the application of the GigaMesh Software Framework on different archaeological finds. GigaMesh is able to handle 3D data, the surface of objects described by a mesh, acquired by low- and high-resolution 3D recording techniques. The initial development was motivated by cuneiform script and its digital processing. In the la...

Cuneiform tablets appertain to the oldest textual artifacts and are in extent comparable to texts written in Latin or ancient Greek. The Cuneiform Commentaries Project (CPP) from Yale University provides tracings of cuneiform tablets with annotated transliterations and translations. As a part of our work analyzing cuneiform script computationally w...

Cuneiform tablets appertain to the oldest textual artifacts and are in extent comparable to texts written in Latin or ancient Greek. The Cuneiform Commentaries Project (CPP) from Yale University provides tracings of cuneiform tablets with annotated transliterations and translations. As a part of our work analyzing cuneiform script computationally w...

3D-artifacts from ancient civilizations contain many different kinds of information in form of forensic trace evidence, e.g., tool marks from styli or fingerprints on wax sealings. These very fine structures are increasingly captured by various 3D-acquisiton techniques and stored as irregular meshes. We introduce filter algorithms for the processin...

Deciphering the Maya writing is an ongoing effort that has already started in the early 19th century. Inexpertly-created drawings of Maya writing systems resulted in a large number of misinterpretations concerning the contents of these glyphs. As a consequence, the decryption of Maya writing systems has experienced several setbacks. Modern research...

Libraries, archives and museums have vast numbers of objects with Script in 3D like inscriptions, coins and seals, which provide valuable insight into human history. Especially cuneiform tablets provide access to information about more than three millennia before the birth of Christ. As these clay tablets require an extensive autopsy for transcript...

www.ag-caa.de/workshop2017/

Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft Computeranwendungen und Quantitative Methoden in der Archäologie (AD CAA) veranstaltet jährlich einen gleichnamigen Workshop, der 2013 an der Freien Universität Berlin stattfand. Die Aufsätze zeigen, dass dreidimensionale Daten bei der archäologischen Dokumentation und Analyse immer wichtiger werden. 3D-Modelle oder digitale...

Aufgrund ihrer gekrümmten Form sind Keilschrifttafeln auf Photos häufig nicht vollständig lesbar. Eine besser lesbare zweidimensionale Darstellung lässt sich durch Anwendung eines lokalen Filterverfahrens auf die hoch aufgelösten 3D-Scandaten der Tafeln erreichen. Dieses Verfahren berechnet die lokale Krümmung auf mehreren Maßstabsebenen mithilfe v...

Cuneiform scripts constitute an immense source of information about ancient history, dating back almost four thousand years. Documents were written by imprinting wedge-shaped impressions into wet clay tablets, and current scholarly practice typically transcribes the resulting markings by hand with ink on paper. This work develops algorithmic method...

Assyriology is the study of cultures related to cuneiform writing, which was used for more than three millennia before Christ in the ancient Middle East. Drawing hundreds of thousands of documents with cuneiform script manually is a tedious task and leads to a demand for automated tools assisting the daily work of assyriologists. The cuneiform scri...

Assyriology is the study of cultures related to cuneiform writing, which was used for more than three millennia before Christ in the ancient Middle East. Drawing hundreds of thousands of documents with cuneiform script manually is a tedious task and leads to a demand for automated tools assisting the daily work of assyriologists. The cuneiform scri...

Documents written in cuneiform script are one of the largest sources about ancient history. The script is written by imprinting wedges (Latin: cunei) into clay tablets and was used for almost four millennia. This three-dimensional script is typically transcribed by hand with ink on paper. These transcriptions are available in large quantities as ra...

Documents written in cuneiform script are one of the largest sources about ancient history. The script is written by imprinting wedges (Latin: cunei) into clay tablets and was used for almost four millennia. This three-dimensional script is typically transcribed by hand with ink on paper. These transcriptions are available in large quantities as ra...

Keilschrift ist eine der ältesten bekannten Schriftformen, die über drei Jahrtausende im vorderen Orient verwendet wurde. Ein Keilschriftzeichen besteht aus keilförmigen Eindrücken eines eckigen Stylus in einer Tontafel. Bis zum heutigen Tag wurde eine enorme Menge an Keilschrifttafeln freigelegt, die im Umfang den Texten in Latein bzw. Altgriechis...

Documents written in cuneiform script are one of the largest sources about ancient history. The script is written by imprinting wedges (Latin: cunei) into clay tablets and was used for almost four millennia. This three-dimensional script is typically transcribed by hand with ink on paper. These transcriptions are available in large quantities as ra...

Data fusion of inputs from fundamentally different imaging techniques requires the identification of a common subset to allow for registration and alignment. In this paper, we describe how to reduce the isosurface of a volumetric object representation to its exterior surface, as this is the equivalent amount of data an optical surface scan of the v...

Rechnergestützte Methoden gewinnen vor Gericht zunehmend an Bedeutung, da sie eine Objektive und nachvollziehbare Beweisführung ermöglichen. Diese beginnt mit der Dokumentation von Unfallorten, Tatorten und betroffenen Personen. Dabei werden verstärkt Systeme eingesetzt, die unterschiedlichste 3D-Messdaten liefern. Vor allem in verwandten forensisc...

Motivated by the increased demand for computerized analysis of documents within the Digital Humanities we are developing algorithms for cuneiform tablets, which contain the oldest handwritten script used for more than three millennia. These tablets are typically found in the Middle East and contain a total amount of written words comparable to all...

The application of X-radiography in ceramic studies is becoming an increasingly valued method. Using the potential of industrial X-ray computed tomography (CT) for non-destructive testing as an archaeometric or archaeological method in pottery studies, especially regarding aspects such as manufacturing techniques or pottery abrics, requires control...

Project ILATO focuses on Improving Limited Angle computed Tomography by Optical data integration in order to enhance image quality and shorten acquisition times in X-ray based industrial quality inspection. Limited angle computed tomography is indicated whenever specimen dimensions exceed cone beam limits or the object is impenetrable from certain...

Project ILATO focuses on Improving Limited Angle computed Tomography by Optical data integration in order to enhance image quality and shorten acquisition times in X-ray based industrial quality inspection. Limited angle computed tomography is indicated whenever specimen dimensions exceed cone beam limits or the object is impenetrable from certain...