AUTHORS: Lorenzo Bianchi, Fabrizio Falchi, Alejandro Moreo, Fabrizio Sebastiani, Costanza Bianchi

WORK PACKAGE: WP 4

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Keywords:

Abstract In the course of history, many ancient manuscripts
(i.e., bound volumes of manuscripts) written in the Coptic lan
guage have been dismembered, often at the hand of sellers of an
tiques, into individual sheets, who have ended up scattered across
the planet. Reconstructing these manuscripts in their original
form would be extremely important for a better understanding
of the culture of Coptic-speaking communities, and is a long
standing goal of paleographers and egyptologists alike. In this
paper we present ReCoptic, a probabilistic, “contrastive” image
classification system based on computer vision techniques, whose
goal is to aid scholars in reconstructing dismembered ancient
Coptic manuscripts. Given a collection of scans of individual
pages of ancient Coptic manuscripts, the system evaluates, for
each pair of such scans, the (“posterior”) probability that the
two pages originate from the same manuscript, and ranks all
such pairs in descending order of their associated posterior
probability. The scholar can thus discover yet unknown pairs
of pages originating from the same manuscript by examining,
starting from the top of the list, the pairs proposed by ReCoptic.
In experiments that we have run on a collection of 6,000+
pages of Coptic manuscripts, ReCoptic displays extremely high
accuracy.