A variational model for glyph extraction, theoretical aspects and implementation

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.