Reproducing the Past: A Dataset for Benchmarking Inscription Restoration

Inscriptions on ancient steles, as carriers of culture, encapsulate the humanistic thoughts and aesthetic values of our ancestors. However, these relics often deteriorate due to environmental and human factors, resulting in significant information loss. Since the advent of inscription rubbing technology over a millennium ago, archaeologists and epigraphers have devoted immense effort to manually restoring these cultural imprints, endeavoring to unlock the storied past within each rubbing. This paper approaches this challenge as a multi-modal task, aiming to establish a novel benchmark for the inscription restoration from rubbings. In doing so, we construct the Chinese Inscription Rubbing Image (CIRI) dataset, which includes a wide variety of real inscription rubbing images characterized by diverse calligraphy styles, intricate character structures, and complex degradation forms. Furthermore, we develop a synthesis approach to generate "intact-degraded'' paired data, mirroring real-world degradation faithfully. On top of the datasets, we propose a baseline framework that achieves visual consistency and textual integrity through global and local diffusion-based restoration processes and explicit incorporation of domain knowledge. Comprehensive evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our pipeline, demonstrating significant improvements in visual presentation and textual integrity. The project is available at: https://github.com/blackprotoss/CIRI.