Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
1038445 | Journal of Cultural Heritage | 2012 | 9 Pages |
Virtual restoration of cultural heritage (CH) artefacts is an important task that aims to digitally recreate the original appearance of damaged items. In this paper, a method that can be used for virtual restoration of faces appearing in damaged Byzantine icons is presented. Given a damaged face, the complete three-dimensional (3D) geometry of the face is reconstructed using data from the non-damaged facial parts and the texture of the damaged areas is restored. A key aspect of the proposed method is the use of a customized 3D deformable face model suitable for representing the geometry of Byzantine faces, the so-called Byzantine Style Specific Model (BSSM). A BSSM is generated by enforcing rule-based constraints on a deformable model trained using 3D scans of human faces. The use of a BSSM ensures that the Byzantine style is preserved during the process of shape restoration.