ProtoSnap

project page | paper

Rachel Mikulinsky*¹, Morris Alper*¹, Shai Gordin², Enrique Jimenez³, Yoram Cohen¹, Hadar Averbuch-Elor^1,4

¹Tel Aviv University, ²Ariel University, ³LMU, ⁴Cornell University *Equal Contribution

This is the official implementation of ProtoSnap, a method for aligning a cuneiform prototype and a corresponding sign image. ICLR 2025

Given a target image of a cuneiform sign, and a correspoiding prototype with annotated skeleton, we align the skeletong with the target image. To this aim, we use diffusion features, extracted from a fine-tuned stable diffusion model.
We used this method to train ControlNet, to generate new a diverse cuneiform signs, based only on a prototype. Weights for the ControlNet are available here.

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

To download the weights:

gdown 'https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1x2RlD4jk3O7QFZ6z4ApkSe4RWNnJq_K_'
unzip weights.zip -d weights
rm weights.zip

Run

Run on a single image

To run on a single sign image:

python main.py <prompt> --target_image_path <path_to_image_dir>

Arguments:

• prompt The name of the sign (such as A, AN, MA, etc.), used as prompt to the SD model
• --target_image_path The directory path where the targe image is located. The image name should be <prompt>.png. By defualt - target_images
• --font_dir The directory with available prototypes. By default - prototypes/Santakku, corresponding to Old Babylonian era. The font Assurbanipal for the Neo-Assyrian era avaliable as well in this repo
• --con_dir The directory with annotated skeletons. By default - skeletons/Santakku, skeletons for Assurbanipal font available as well.
• --output_folder None by default. If not None, the results will be saved under output/<output_folder>, else directly under output

Run on the test set

To run the system on a list of images:

python run_test.py --samples_df_path <samples_csv>

Arguments:

• --samples_df_path A metadata csv for the requested samples. By default test_set/metadata.csv
• --font_dir, --con_dir and --output_folder same as for a single image

Generate images with ControlNet

To generate images using our fine-tunes ControlNet:

python gen_images_with_cn.py <sign_name> --num_of_samples <num_of_samples>

The script generats controls, by using available skeletons, and applying small agumentations on each stroke, to create diversity. Then each control is used to generate an image, using ControlNet.

Arguments:

• sign_name The name of the sign to generate (such as A, AN, MA, etc.)
• --num_of_samples Number of samples to generate. 50 by default
• --output_path The results will be saved under <output_path>/<sign_name>/images. The controls used for generation will be saved under <output_path>/<sign_name>/controls]

Acknowledgments

• The method and the test set were devolped using the cunieform OCR dataset. The photographs of tablets are from the British Museum Digital Collections.
• This implementation uses code form the official repository of DIFT

Citation

If you find this project useful, you may cite us as follows:

@misc{mikulinsky2025protosnapprototypealignmentcuneiform,
      title={ProtoSnap: Prototype Alignment for Cuneiform Signs}, 
      author={Rachel Mikulinsky and Morris Alper and Shai Gordin and Enrique Jiménez and Yoram Cohen and Hadar Averbuch-Elor},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2502.00129},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00129},