Virtual Restoration of Faces Appearing in Byzantine Icons

Abstract

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.