Segmentation of Maya Hieroglyphs through Fine-Tuned Foundation Models

The study of Maya hieroglyphic writing unlocks the rich history of cultural and societal knowledge embedded within this ancient civilization's visual narrative. Machine learning (ML) offers a novel lens through which we can translate these inscriptions, with the potential to allow non-specialists access to reading these texts and to aid in the decipherment of those hieroglyphs which continue to elude comprehensive interpretation. Toward this, we leverage a large foundation model to segment Maya hieroglyphs from an open-source digital library dedicated to Maya artifacts. Despite the initial promise of publicly available foundation segmentation models, their effectiveness in accurately segmenting Maya hieroglyphs was initially limited. Addressing this challenge, our study involved the meticulous curation of image and label pairs with the assistance of experts in Maya art and history, enabling the fine-tuning of these foundation models. This process significantly enhanced model performance, illustrating the potential of fine-tuning approaches and the value of our expanding dataset. We plan to open-source this dataset for encouraging future research, and eventually to help make the hieroglyphic texts legible to a broader community, particularly for Maya heritage community members.