Fast and efficient reconstruction of digitized frescoes

•Automatic reconstruction of destroyed frescoes.•Efficiency with respect to a large number of irregular and spurious fragments.•Color-constrained matching between keypoints.•Analysis of the fresco and fragment features impacting the performance. Virtually recomposing destroyed frescoes is of great importance for heritage conservation. Given a digitized fresco image and a digitized set of fragments, such a problem is challenging due to the potentially large number of fragments, their irregular shape, uniqueness and non-overlapping constraints, the possible absence of fragments and the possible presence of small, homogeneous, eroded and/or spurious fragments. To cope with these specific features, we propose in this paper a fast and efficient non-dense approach benefiting from previous developments in pattern matching. Preliminary experiments led on simulations exhibit a mean accuracy above 90% with a mean translation error of less than 4 pixels and a mean orientation error of about 1 degree. An analysis of fresco and fragment features impacting the algorithm is also provided. Compared to a dense approach and the recent DeepMatch approach, the proposed one remains competitive both in running time and accuracy.