Color Restoration of Scanned Archaeological Artifacts with Repetitive Patterns

Abstract

Our work addresses the problem of virtually restoring archaeological artifacts. Virtual restoration is the process of creating a noise-free model of a degraded object, to visualize its original appearance. Our work focuses on restoring the coloring of the object. We considered both 2D and 3D objects, including scans of ancient texts and 3D models of decorated pottery. Our denoising method exploits typical characteristics of archaeological artifacts, such as repetitive decoration motifs and a limited palette of colors. Our classification method is based on minimization of an energy function, which includes a correspondence term, to encourage consistent labeling of similar regions. The energy function is minimized using the Graph-Cuts algorithm.