Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Safaei, Omidreza, Aslan, Sinem, Vascon, Sebastiano, Palmieri, Luca, Khoroshiltseva, Marina, Pelillo, Marcello
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06389
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918375736737792
author Safaei, Omidreza
Aslan, Sinem
Vascon, Sebastiano
Palmieri, Luca
Khoroshiltseva, Marina
Pelillo, Marcello
author_facet Safaei, Omidreza
Aslan, Sinem
Vascon, Sebastiano
Palmieri, Luca
Khoroshiltseva, Marina
Pelillo, Marcello
contents Reassembling real-world archaeological artifacts from fragmented pieces poses significant challenges due to erosion, missing regions, irregular shapes, and large-scale ambiguity. Traditional jigsaw puzzle solvers, often designed for clean synthetic scenarios, struggle under these conditions, especially when the number of fragments grows into the thousands, as in the RePAIR benchmark. In this paper, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HIL) puzzle solving framework designed to address the complexity and scale of real-world cultural heritage reconstruction. Our approach integrates an automatic relaxation-labeling solver with interactive human guidance, allowing users to iteratively lock verified placements, correct errors, and guide the system toward semantically and geometrically coherent assemblies. We introduce two complementary interaction strategies, Iterative Anchoring and Continuous Interactive Refinement, which support scalable reconstruction across varying levels of ambiguity and puzzle size. Experiments on several RePAIR groups demonstrate that our hybrid approach substantially outperforms both fully automatic and manual baselines in accuracy and efficiency, offering a practical solution for large-scale expert-in-the-loop artifact reassembly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06389
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Solving Jigsaw Puzzles in the Wild: Human-Guided Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage Fragments
Safaei, Omidreza
Aslan, Sinem
Vascon, Sebastiano
Palmieri, Luca
Khoroshiltseva, Marina
Pelillo, Marcello
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Reassembling real-world archaeological artifacts from fragmented pieces poses significant challenges due to erosion, missing regions, irregular shapes, and large-scale ambiguity. Traditional jigsaw puzzle solvers, often designed for clean synthetic scenarios, struggle under these conditions, especially when the number of fragments grows into the thousands, as in the RePAIR benchmark. In this paper, we propose a human-in-the-loop (HIL) puzzle solving framework designed to address the complexity and scale of real-world cultural heritage reconstruction. Our approach integrates an automatic relaxation-labeling solver with interactive human guidance, allowing users to iteratively lock verified placements, correct errors, and guide the system toward semantically and geometrically coherent assemblies. We introduce two complementary interaction strategies, Iterative Anchoring and Continuous Interactive Refinement, which support scalable reconstruction across varying levels of ambiguity and puzzle size. Experiments on several RePAIR groups demonstrate that our hybrid approach substantially outperforms both fully automatic and manual baselines in accuracy and efficiency, offering a practical solution for large-scale expert-in-the-loop artifact reassembly.
title Solving Jigsaw Puzzles in the Wild: Human-Guided Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage Fragments
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06389