Computer Vision News - October 2021

3 Summary 25 RePAIR Pompeii The team will soon be launching a dedicated website that describes the work. It is a Horizon 2020 project, under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Open program, which is an extremely selective call that gives very few proposals the green light. Marcello and the University of Venice are the project coordinators, withother partners including the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, the Italian Institute of Technology in Italy, theUniversityofBonn in Germany, Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, and the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, which is one of the biggest archaeological parks in the world. “We are introducing a revolutionary technology in archaeology,” Marcello says proudly. “My archaeologist friends tell me that if we succeed, as we hope, then this will be a huge breakthrough in their field. When you have an object that has broken into thousands or even tens of thousands of pieces, it’s just hopeless to think that any human team can solve it. Actually, in Pompeii they did try, but had to give up in the end.” Marcello hopes the technology they propose will be able to be used by other museums with broken frescoes, as well as exported to other domains. “There are other problems, such as reconstructing papyri, vases, or other kinds of broken artifacts,” he adds. “We hope our technology will turn out to be useful when the scale of the problem is unmanageable by humans! ” Marcello and team on site