Computer Vision News - October 2021

2 Summary AI for A cheology 2 Marcello Pelillo is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Readers may also remember him as General Chair of ICCV 2017 and as Chief Editor of Frontiers in Computer Vision. He is leading an EU- funded project called RePAIR, which is using AI and computer vision to facilitate the reconstruction of some ancient artwork at the archaeological site of Pompeii. Marcello tells us more about this exciting mission. Around 2,000 years ago, a volcano called Vesuvius put an end to life in Pompeii (near Naples, Italy), but many artifacts still remain from the time when the Roman city flourished. The Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Meet Cultural Heritage project is working with the archaeological site to physically reconstruct large- scale broken frescoes. The project’s acronym is RePAIR and that is exactly what Marcello Pelillo and his team are aiming to do. “Reconstructing a fresco, from a conceptual point of view, is like solving a jigsaw puzzle,” he tells us. “But in reality, it’s so much more difficult! These are l arge-scale frescoes containing thousands of pieces . Some are very small, but some are pretty big. There’s no puzzle box with a nice clear photo of what it will look like when we finish the job. In most cases, it’s more of a blind search . Also, it’s not like you have all the pieces and it’s just a matter of assembling them in the right order. Pieces typically don’t match perfectly, and many are missing. It’s a really tricky problem.” Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Meet Cultural Heritage (RePAIR) To solve this, the team use information from the 3D geometry of the pieces , which are basically stones with one flat side that is colored and decorated. One of the first tasks of the project, which started earlier last month, is to scan all the pieces to get 3D images and create a database containing information abouttheir shape, 3D geometry, decoration, and appearance .