Volume 65, pp. 123-139, 2026.

A variational model for glyph extraction, theoretical aspects and implementation

Andrea Azzarelli and Alessandro Buccini

Abstract

A common task in archaeology is extracting incisions or glyphs from a surface. This procedure is usually done manually. Therefore, it is prone to errors and can be extremely time consuming. In this work we present a variational model to automatically extract these incisions. We model this problem as a variational problem, where we wish to split the archaeological surface into two components, a smooth one, containing the background, and a sparse one, containing the glyph. To perform the minimization, we employ the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). We detail a procedure to generate realistic synthetic data, and we show the performance of the proposed method on this kind of data. Moreover, we test our algorithm on a real-world example and provide a Matlab implementation of it.

Full Text (PDF) [2.5 MB], BibTeX , DOI: 10.1553/etna_vol65s123

Key words

glyph extraction, variational models, alternating direction multiplier method, fractional Laplacian

AMS subject classifications

65K10, 68U10, 49M27

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