Semi-automatic Solving of "Jigsaw puzzles" for Material Reconstruction of Dead Sea Scrolls

Abstract

Digital solving of jigsaw puzzles have been well researched throughout the years and multiple approaches to solve them have been proposed. But these approaches have not been applied to reconstructing ancient manuscripts out of transient material such as leather or parchment. The literature describes ways to reconstruct ancient artefacts but they describe the process for more durable objects like pottery. In this thesis we explore the usability of the existing state-of-the-art methods for the purpose of aiding reconstructing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, also known as Qumran scrolls. Our experiments show that the existing methods as such do not provide good results in this domain, but with modifications provide help through a semi-automated reconstruction process. We expect these modifications and the software that was created as a by-product of this thesis to ease the researchers' work by automating the previously laborious manual work