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Developed by Diego Sinitò.
Fragmented glass plate photographs
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Coordinators
Filippo Stanco, Davide Tanasi
Team
Description
During a recent digitalization project of the textual and iconographical fund of Departmentof Archaeology Library of the Catania University, one of the largest and oldest betweenItalian academies, a serious problem was represented by the iconographical resources onglass plates coated by silver halide.
The Library has an archive of about 3000 glass plates taken between the last two decades of the '800 and the first half of the '900, depicting the masterpieces of Greek and Roman art and documenting the excavation activities of the Department in Italy, North Africa, and Greece. Several of these plates are damaged and fractured and cannot be used for reproduction and cannot be properly digitalized. Even trying to acquire them with a scanner or with a digital camera, after a manual recomposing of the sherds, gaps and fracture lines will remain visible in the output because of an incorrect coincidence of the fragments or for the lost of the emulsion.
In order to solve this problem and to quicken the process restoring a large amount of fractured glass plates, in this paper we propose an automatic method for the virtual restoration based on the use of image processing techniques.
The algorithm reduces luminance artifacts originated by the interaction between the scanner light and the glass and then it performs an image registration using a roto-translation to align the different pieces. Finally, the algorithm eliminates possible pixels that are still in the gap using inpainting techniques that gives more realistic final images.
The Library has an archive of about 3000 glass plates taken between the last two decades of the '800 and the first half of the '900, depicting the masterpieces of Greek and Roman art and documenting the excavation activities of the Department in Italy, North Africa, and Greece. Several of these plates are damaged and fractured and cannot be used for reproduction and cannot be properly digitalized. Even trying to acquire them with a scanner or with a digital camera, after a manual recomposing of the sherds, gaps and fracture lines will remain visible in the output because of an incorrect coincidence of the fragments or for the lost of the emulsion.
In order to solve this problem and to quicken the process restoring a large amount of fractured glass plates, in this paper we propose an automatic method for the virtual restoration based on the use of image processing techniques.
The algorithm reduces luminance artifacts originated by the interaction between the scanner light and the glass and then it performs an image registration using a roto-translation to align the different pieces. Finally, the algorithm eliminates possible pixels that are still in the gap using inpainting techniques that gives more realistic final images.
Gallery
Publications
Stanco, Filippo and Tanasi, Davide and Gallo, Giovanni, "Digital Reconstruction of Fragmented Glass Plate Photographs: the Case of Archaeological Photography". Communications in Applied and Industrial Mathematics, Vol 2.1, pp. pp. 1-11, DOI 10.1685/journal.caim.361, 2011.
Stanco, F. and Tenze, L. and Ramponi, G. and De Polo, A., "Virtual restoration of fragmented glass plate photographs". Proceedings of the Mediterranean Electrotechnical Conference - MELECON, Vol 1, pp. 243-246, 2004.
Thesis
Ghaleb Tarek HAMADÈ, "Tecniche di restauro digitale per fotografie su lastre di vetro". Supervisor: G. Ramponi, Assistant supervisor: F. Stanco, 2006.
Giuseppe David Leonardi, "Restauro virtuale di frammenti di lastre di vetro". Supervisor: G. Gallo, Assistant supervisor: F. Stanco, 2007.
Mario Valerio Giuffrida, "Virtual restoration of fragmented photographic glass plate". Supervisor: F. Stanco, 2010.
