  Machine learning techniques are presented for automatic recognition of the
historical letters (XI-XVIII centuries) carved on the stoned walls of St.Sophia
cathedral in Kyiv (Ukraine). A new image dataset of these carved Glagolitic and
Cyrillic letters (CGCL) was assembled and pre-processed for recognition and
prediction by machine learning methods. The dataset consists of more than 4000
images for 34 types of letters. The explanatory data analysis of CGCL and
notMNIST datasets shown that the carved letters can hardly be differentiated by
dimensionality reduction methods, for example, by t-distributed stochastic
neighbor embedding (tSNE) due to the worse letter representation by stone
carving in comparison to hand writing. The multinomial logistic regression
(MLR) and a 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) models were applied. The MLR
model demonstrated the area under curve (AUC) values for receiver operating
characteristic (ROC) are not lower than 0.92 and 0.60 for notMNIST and CGCL,
respectively. The CNN model gave AUC values close to 0.99 for both notMNIST and
CGCL (despite the much smaller size and quality of CGCL in comparison to
notMNIST) under condition of the high lossy data augmentation. CGCL dataset was
published to be available for the data science community as an open source
resource.
