Recognition and Translation of Ancient South Arabian Musnad Inscriptions

Inscriptions play an important role in preserving historical information. As such, conservation of these inscriptions provides valuable insights into the history and cultural heritage of the region. Musnad inscriptions are considered one of the earliest forms of writing from the Arabian Peninsula, preceding the modern Arabic font; however, most Musnad inscriptions remain unread and untranslated, signifying a substantial loss of historical information. In response, this paper represents a significant contribution to the field by proposing a successful approach to interpreting Musnad inscriptions. To do so, a dataset was prepared from the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture and subjected to preprocessing for optimal recognition, a step that entailed several experiments to enhance image quality and preparedness for recognition. The dataset was then trained and tested with 29 classes using three different convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: Visual Geometry Group 16 (VGG16), Residual Network 50 (ResNet50) and MobileNetV2. Thereafter, the performance of each architecture was evaluated based on its accuracy in recognising Musnad inscriptions. The results demonstrate that VGG16 achieved the highest accuracy of 93.81%, followed by ResNet50 at 89.39% and MobileNetV2 at 80.02%.