Digital Restoration of Archaeological Heritage

Abstract

Virtual Restoration of archaeological heritage stems from the need to create a clearer and better image of the beautiful historic monuments now in ruins. It gives the viewer a sense and feel of how the heritage originally looked. For this, there are many restoration projects of the major historic sites, paintings etc, going on across the world. Computers have been introduced to archaeology and cultural heritage as tools for promoting scientific work and as electronic aids for providing users with substantial information on archaeological heritage. Small holes and breakages in the monuments/paintings can severely degrade its appeal to viewers. Image restoration is the operation of taking a corrupted/noisy image and estimating the clean original image. In this work, we have proposed a method to automatically detect the defect in the corrupted image using Perona Malik Anisotropic Diffusion and Binary Thresholding, followed by Image Inpainting with Navier-Stokes Method, which have been found to be effective in the art of restoring lost/selected parts of an image based on the background information in a visually plausible way.