Gca-pvt-net: group convolutional attention and PVT dual-branch network for oracle bone drill chisel segmentation

Abstract Oracle bones (Obs) are a significant carrier of the shang dynasty civilization, primarily consisting of tortoise shells and animal bones, through the study of which we can gain a deeper understanding of the political, economic, religious, and cultural aspects of the shang dynasty. The oracle bone drill chisel (Obdc) is considered an essential non-textual material. The segmentation of Obdc assists archaeologists determine the approximate age of the Obs, which possesses considerable research value. However, the breakage of thousands of years of underground buried Obs, the blurring of the edges of the area burned by the Obdc, the different shapes, and the inconsistent number have brought challenges to the accurate segmentation of the Obdc. In this article, we propose a group convolutional attention and pvt dual-branch network (GCA-PVT-Net) for Obdc segmentation. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to research the automatic segmentation of Obdc. It is a hybrid Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer framework. The work offers the following contributions: (1) The Obdc images are labeled based on the delineation criteria of different drill chisel (DC) shapes to create the Obdc dataset. (2) A convolutional attention module (CAM) is proposed as both an encoder and decoder. The feature extraction process, which effectively integrates global and local information, ensures better modeling of long-term correlations in images while preserving details. (3) A channel feature aggregation module (CFAM) is designed to enhance the effective integration of channel features, enabling feature fusion across various branches and at different levels. (4) The edge deep supervision strategy is applied to smooth the jagged edge of the predicted images at the decoder’s end. Extensive experiments on the Obdc dataset show that GCA-PVT-Net outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The comparative experimental results show that the edge accuracy and segmentation accuracy of the model reach the top 1.