Can Artificial Intelligence Reconstruct Ancient Mosaics?

Abstract

A large number of ancient mosaics have not reached us because they have been destroyed by erosion, earthquakes, looting or even used as materials in newer construction. To make things worse, among the small fraction of mosaics that we have been able to recover, many are damaged or incomplete.Therefore, restoration and reconstruction of mosaics play a fundamental role to preserve cultural heritage and to understand the role of mosaics in ancient cultures. This reconstruction has traditionally been done manually and more recently using computer graphics programs but always by humans. In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made impressive progress in the generation of images from text descriptions and reference images. State of the art AI tools such as DALL-E2 can generate high quality images from text prompts and can take a reference image to guide the process. In august 2022, DALL-E2 launched a new feature called outpainting that takes as input an incomplete image and a text prompt and then generates a complete image filling the missing parts. In this paper,

Graphic Reconstruction of a Roman Mosaic with Scenes of the Abduction of Europa

“…Research by Moral-Andrés et al [31] proves that AI approaches are increasingly relevant for inclusion in the framework of mosaic reconstruction. Research recently analysed the Dall-E tool with the aim of reconstructing images of both mosaics with more complex motifs (people, animals, etc.)…”