journal article·2026-01-15Open access

Ladder-side mixture of experts adapters for bronze inscription recognition

Rixin Zhou, Peiqiang Qiu, Qian Zhang, Chuntao Li, Xi Yang

npj Heritage Science· Volume 14· Issue 1

Abstract

Bronze inscriptions (BI), engraved on ritual vessels, constitute a crucial stage of early Chinese writing and provide indispensable evidence for archeological and historical studies. However, automatic BI recognition is challenging due to visual degradation, cross-domain variability among photographs, rubbings, and tracings, and an extremely long-tailed character distribution. To address these challenges, we curate a large-scale BI dataset comprising 22,454 full-page images and 198,598 annotated characters spanning 6658 unique categories, enabling robust cross-domain evaluation. Building on this resource, we develop a two-stage detection-recognition pipeline. To handle heterogeneous domains and rare classes, we equip the pipeline with LadderMoE, which augments a pretrained CLIP encoder with ladder-style MoE adapters for dynamic expert specialization and enhanced robustness. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art scene text recognition baselines, achieving superior accuracy across head, mid, and tail categories as well as all acquisition modalities, establishing a strong foundation for downstream archeological analysis.
Source: openalex_inverted_index · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction · Handwritten Text Recognition Techniques · Currency Recognition and Detection

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

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