Work

Automatic characterization of the border deterioration in Byzantine seals

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Byzantine seals were attached to official documents to authenticate the sender, thus enclosing a valuable part of the Byzantine Empire’s history. With the aim to provide computational models to help historians in the seal interpretation, this paper proposes a method to automatically determine the level of deterioration of the seal borders from their photographs, i.e., a non-destructive inspection. The method consists of a segmentation step based on Morphological Geodesic Active Contours, a feature extraction step, and a classification step that groups the seals into four border deterioration categories. Our best results reached 0.80 in accuracy, 0.73 in Cohen’s Kappa statistics score, and 0.80 in the macro F1 score. • Classifying Byzantine seals by their border damage is useful since most are broken. • Byzantine seal characteristics indicating border deterioration level are analyzed. • The first border deterioration-based automated Byzantine seal classification. • A method based on segmentation, feature extraction, and classification is proposed. • Accurate classification results are obtained (accuracy = 0.80).

Source: Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage

DOI: 10.1016/j.daach.2025.e00410

Authors: Ege Şendoğan, Victoria Eyharabide, Béatrice Caseau, Isabelle Bloch

Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Sorbonne Université, LIP6, Sens, Texte, Informatique, Histoire, Orient & Méditerranée

Language: English

Topic: Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,810

Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche