Reconnecting the Broken Civilization: Patchwork Integration of Fragments from Ancient Manuscripts

The rich tapestry of human history is often painstakingly pieced together from ancient manuscripts, serving as resilient time capsules of cultural heritage, societal norms, religious tenets, and quotidian life. Unfortunately, the ravages of time, careless preservation, and varied forms of degradation frequently leave us with fragmented relics. The traditional process of reconstructing these fragments is an arduous task, demanding exhaustive manual intervention and a global collaboration among archaeologists. This paper presents a transformative approach to this challenge, harnessing multi-media techniques to restore the connectable fragments of the invaluable Dunhuang scrolls. We curate a unique multimodal dataset of the fragmented Dunhuang manuscripts and architect an innovative three-tiered pipeline to reconstruct these historical scrolls. Our initial stage uses a text-based localization strategy, filtering fragment pairs through text comparison. We then employ a novel self-supervised contour-based pairwise matching framework to overcome the hurdle of limited labeled pairing samples. This process is powered by data augmentation techniques and a Siamese network which determines the most compatible matches. The final stage in our pipeline globally reconstructs the selected fragment pairs with hierarchical clustering, bringing us closer to the original grandeur of the Dunhuang scrolls. Our empirical evaluations reveal that this pipeline exhibits a remarkable success rate in fragment assembly. By addressing this cross-disciplinary challenge, our dataset and pipeline not only contribute to the field of multi-media artificial intelligence but also hold profound implications for sociocultural studies and future explorations into the understanding of ancient cultural history.