  Collector's seals provide important clues about the ownership of a book. They
contain much information pertaining to the essential elements of ancient
materials and also show the details of possession, its relation to the book,
the identity of the collectors and their social status and wealth, amongst
others. Asian collectors have typically used artistic ancient characters rather
than modern ones to make their seals. In addition to the owner's name, several
other words are used to express more profound meanings. A system that
automatically recognizes these characters can help enthusiasts and
professionals better understand the background information of these seals.
However, there is a lack of training data and labelled images, as samples of
some seals are scarce and most of them are degraded images. It is necessary to
find new ways to make full use of such scarce data. While these data are
available online, they do not contain information on the characters'position.
The goal of this research is to provide retrieval tools assist in obtaining
more information from Asian collector's seals imprints without consuming a lot
of computational resources. In this paper, a character segmentation method is
proposed to predict the candidate characters'area without any labelled training
data that contain character coordinate information. A retrieval-based
recognition system that focuses on a single character is also proposed to
support seal retrieval and matching. The experimental results demonstrate that
the proposed character segmentation method performs well on Asian collector's
seals, with 92% of the test data being correctly segmented.
