Pairwise Alignment & Compatibility for Arbitrarily Irregular Image Fragments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid geometric and pictorial method for aligning irregular image fragments, improving archaeological puzzle reconstruction by handling realistic fragment shapes and erosion effects.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel compatibility measure for irregular fragments, a new dataset with erosion simulation, and demonstrates improved puzzle-solving accuracy.

Findings

Achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on RePAIR 2D dataset

Developed a new dataset with erosion effects for realistic fragment testing

Proposed a hybrid alignment method that handles arbitrary fragment shapes

Abstract

Pairwise compatibility calculation is at the core of most fragments-reconstruction algorithms, in particular those designed to solve different types of the jigsaw puzzle problem. However, most existing approaches fail, or aren't designed to deal with fragments of realistic geometric properties one encounters in real-life puzzles. And in all other cases, compatibility methods rely strongly on the restricted shapes of the fragments. In this paper, we propose an efficient hybrid (geometric and pictorial) approach for computing the optimal alignment for pairs of fragments, without any assumptions about their shapes, dimensions, or pictorial content. We introduce a new image fragments dataset generated via a novel method for image fragmentation and a formal erosion model that mimics real-world archaeological erosion, along with evaluation metrics for the compatibility task. We then embed our proposed compatibility into an archaeological puzzle-solving framework and demonstrate state-of-the-art neighborhood-level precision and recall on the RePAIR 2D dataset, directly reflecting compatibility performance improvements.