DAFNE: A dataset of fresco fragments for digital anastlylosis

Abstract Restoring artworks seriously damaged or completely destroyed is a challenging task. In particular, the reconstruction of frescoes has to deal with problems such as very small fragments, irregular shapes and missing pieces. Several attempts have been done to develop new techniques for helping restorers in the matching process, starting from traditional image processing methods to the more recent deep learning approaches. However, as often happens in the Cultural Heritage field, the availability of labeled data to test new strategies is limited, and publicly available datasets contain only few samples. For this reason, in this paper we introduce DAFNE, a large dataset that includes hundreds of thousands of images of fresco fragments artificially generated to guarantee a high variability in terms of shapes and dimensions. Fragments have been obtained starting from 62 images of famous frescoes of various artists and historical periods, in order to consider different artistic styles, subjects and colors.