Semantic Motif Segmentation of Archaeological Fresco Fragments

Aref Enayati, Luca Palmieri, Sebastiano Vascon, Marcello Pelillo, Sinem Aslan

Abstract: Archaeological fragment processing is crucial to support the analysis of pictorial contents of broken artifacts. In this paper, we focus on the unexplored task of semantic segmentation of fresco fragments. This task enables the extraction of semantic information from a fragment, facilitating subsequent tasks like fragment classification or reassembly. We introduce a semantic segmentation dataset of fresco fragments acquired at the Pompeii Archeological Site, accompanied by baseline models. Additionally, we introduce a supplementary task of fragment cleaning, providing a dataset with the detection of manual annotations of archaeological marks that require restoration before further analysis. Our experiments, using standard metrics and state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrate that semantic segmentation of fresco fragments is feasible, paving the way toward more complex activities that require a semantic understanding of fragmented artifacts. Dataset with annotations, and code will be released at https://repairproject.github.io/fragment-restoration/