Rejoining Precious Artifacts: Efficiently Bone Stick Rejoining Based Massive Fragment Images by Contour, Script, and Texture

Abstract Rejoining fragment images of precious artifacts is a meaningful task because complete artifacts could provide valuable clues for the research of human civilization. However, existing rejoining methods face several challenges including time-consuming manual annotation, insufficient rejoining accuracy, and prohibitive computation cost. For rejoining fragment images of bone sticks (a precious artifact), we propose a lightweight vision graph neural network called RejoinViG to address these challenges. First, our method avoids time-consuming manual annotation of ballast contour data by experts. Specifically, our method directly takes a pair of fragment images as input and then determines whether the image pair is rejoinable. Second, our method improves rejoining accuracy by contour, script, and texture through dynamically constructing local and global graphs. Third, our method improves rejoining accuracy while reducing computation cost by introducing a new attention mechanism named node self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly. For example, the Top-1 accuracy of our method is 3.9 times that of SFF-Siam. Surprisingly, our method successfully rejoins a pair of previously unknown but rejoinable fragment images of bone sticks in a real-world scenario.