An integrated system for digital restoration of prehistoric Theran wall paintings

We present a computer vision system for robust restoration of prehistoric Theran wall paintings, replacing or just supporting the work of a specialist. In the case of significant information loss on some areas of murals, the local inpainting methods are not sufficient for satisfactory restoration. Our strategy is to detect an area of relevant semantics, geometry and color in another location of the wall paintings, which in turn is stitched into the missing area by applying a seamless image stitching algorithm. An important part of our digital restoration system is the damaged and missing areas detector. It is used in combination with total variation inpainting at first for the missing area extraction and repair, and secondly for the elimination of minor defects on the retrieved part in the non-local inpainting mechanism. We propose a morphological algorithm for rough detection and we improve upon this approach by incorporating edge information. For missing areas with complicated boundaries we enhance the detection by using iterated graph cuts.