AUTHORS: Lorenzo BIANCHI, Fabrizio FALCHI, Alejandro MOREO, Fabrizio SEBASTIANI and Costanza BIANCHI

Work Package: WP4 – DaMSym

URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11279398/

Keywords: Hands, Computer vision, Codes, Accuracy, Planets, Posterior probability, Probabilistic logic, History, Image reconstruction, Image classification

Abstract

In the course of history, many ancient manuscripts (i.e., bound volumes of manuscripts) written in the Coptic language have been dismembered, often at the hand of sellers of antiques, 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 palaeographers 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.