Homer restored: Virtual reconstruction of Papyrus Bodmer 1

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a complete method to reconstruct a damaged piece of papyrus using its image annotated at the character level and the original ancient Greek text (known otherwise). Our reconstruction allows us to recreate the written surface, making it readable and consistent with the original one. Our method is in two stages. First, the text is reconstructed by pasting character patches in their possible locations. Second, we reconstruct the background of the papyrus by applying inpainting methods. Two different inpainting techniques are tested in this article, one traditional and one using a GAN. This global reconstruction method is applied on a piece of Papyrus Bodmer 1. The results are evaluated visually by the authors of the paper and by researchers in papyrology. This reconstruction allows historians to investigate new paths on the topic of writing culture and materiality while it significantly improves the ability of non specialists to picture what this papyrus, and ancient books in general, could have looked like in Antiquity.