• 800-1900 CE: Japan used a writing system called Kuzushiji

• Cursive Japanese writing style comprising of Chinese characters and Japanese hiragana characters

• 99.99% of Japanese speakers cannot read texts which are more than 150 years old

• Three million books holding important information about Japanese culture and history remain inaccessible to the general public

• Due to lack of manpower, the National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL) has turned to the help of computers to translate these texts into Modern Japanese characters

To use machine learning to automatically translate Kuzushiji to modern Japanese texts in order to unlock classical Japanese literature and Japanese history contained in these books.

I used a 2-step solution where I first use CenterNet neural networks to detect characters within a page, followed by Convoluted Neural Networks with a ResNet backbone to then classify each character to a modern Japanese character.

The kaggle competition can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/c/kuzushiji-recognition/overview