As of this week, I have officially started working full time to make TombReader a reality!
First course of action: improve detection, which is the ability to localize hieroglyphs in a photo prior to knowing what the type is. This part will also take care of finding the columns along which the hieroglyphs are written, as well as finding the cartouches that depict the name of a Pharaoh. The most difficult part of hieroglyph detection is to separate clustered hieroglyphs from each other, but with the use of clever algorithms, the computer will be able to differentiate between the hieroglyphs close to each other. Here is a quick preview of the current state:

Order:
– Raw input image
– Detection output + found columns and cartouches (a cartouche is the frame around a royal name)
– Hieroglyph localisation