# Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03900 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03900/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An open dataset for oracle bone script recognition and decipherment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15365/) (2024)
- [Recognition of Oracle Bone Inscriptions by using Two Deep Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00777/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [OracleSage: Towards Unified Visual-Linguistic Understanding of Oracle Bone Scripts through Cross-Modal Knowledge Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17837/) (2024)
- [Clustering-based Feature Representation Learning for Oracle Bone Inscriptions Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18641/) (2025)
- [OracleAgent: A Multimodal Reasoning Agent for Oracle Bone Script Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26114/) (2025)
- [Rejoining fragmented ancient bamboo slips with physics-driven deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08601/) (2025)
- [AlphaOracle: Oracle bone script decipherment via human-workflow-inspired deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17849/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Oracle bone inscriptions(OBI) is the earliest developed writing system in China, bearing invaluable written exemplifications of early Shang history and paleography. However, the task of deciphering OBI, in the current climate of the scholarship, can prove extremely challenging. Out of the 4,500 oracle bone characters excavated, only a third have been successfully identified. Therefore, leveraging the advantages of advanced AI technology to assist in the decipherment of OBI is a highly essential research topic. However, fully utilizing AI's capabilities in these matters is reliant on having a comprehensive and high-quality annotated OBI dataset at hand whereas most existing datasets are only annotated in just a single or a few dimensions, limiting the value of their potential application. For instance, the Oracle-MNIST dataset only offers 30k images classified into 10 categories. Therefore, this paper proposes an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset(OBIMD), which includes annotation information for 10,077 pieces of oracle bones. Each piece has two modalities: pixel-level aligned rubbings and facsimiles. The dataset annotates the detection boxes, character categories, transcriptions, corresponding inscription groups, and reading sequences in the groups of each oracle bone character, providing a comprehensive and high-quality level of annotations. This dataset can be used for a variety of AI-related research tasks relevant to the field of OBI, such as OBI Character Detection and Recognition, Rubbing Denoising, Character Matching, Character Generation, Reading Sequence Prediction, Missing Characters Completion task and so on. We believe that the creation and publication of a dataset like this will help significantly advance the application of AI algorithms in the field of OBI research.