A.I. To Restore Lost Art
Pompeii fresco fragments (credit: Project RePAIR)
How do you restore an ancient fresco, painted nearly two-thousand years ago, that now lies shattered in thousands of pieces? You design an international collaboration between archaeologists; art restorers; robotic engineers; and machine learning software programmers. RePAIR, Reconstructing the past with Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, was established by the European Union (EU) in an attempt to do just that. The project aims to recover ancient painting and other artifacts that once decorated buildings in Pompeii before the Roman town was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.
According to RePAIR, a primary goal of this cutting-edge technology demonstration is to develop an innovative way to eliminate one of the most labor-intensive steps in archaeological research, ie. the reconstruction of shattered fragments by hand. Most artifacts from global excavation sites have not survived intact and are uncovered in broken conditions. The task of laboriously matching the pieces into a restored object is time-consuming and expensive. If robots could be trained to do this, it will allow archaeologists and historians more time for exploration and discovery. Pompeii was a perfect laboratory for RePAIR to demonstrate the potential of their vision of more rapid art restoration.
Reconstructing Pompeii frescoes and pottery with AI-trained robots (credit: Project RePAIR)
The program integrates technologies from diverse academic and industrial fields that typically don't interact with each other. By utilizing cutting-edge bio-mimicry influenced robots; computer vision 3D scanners; machine learning algorithms; and art restoration, the program hopes to showcase that reconstruction can be accomplished rapidly and ancient artworks recovered which otherwise would have remained shattered. RePAIR is creating an intelligent robotic system that will autonomously process, scan, match, and re-assemble fractured objects using flexible "hands" in a fraction of the time that would have been required by a person.
The multi-disciplinary effort has developed completely novel solutions to reach its lofty goals that potentially have wider applications. RePAIR is pushing the limits of art preservation, historical discovery, and the use of machine learning in practical, real-world situations. It would be worth a visit to Pompeii to watch the progress as the 2000 year old wall paintings come back to life. WHB