Pompeii's RePAIR project concludes: artificial intelligence reassembles lost frescoes

One of the most ambitious experiments in recent years in the field of cultural heritage protection has come to a close in Pompeii. RePAIR, a European project dedicated to the robotic reassembly of fragmented frescoes, has reached its conclusion after four years of work in which archaeology, artificial intelligence, and robotics worked side by side to tackle a challenge long considered insurmountable: reassembling works of art reduced to hundreds or thousands of pieces without a final image to refer to.

The robotic platform, tested within the Archaeological Park and positioned in the renovated Casina Rustica, demonstrated its ability to autonomously recognize and manipulate digitized fragments, thanks to two arms equipped with "soft hands" and a complex vision system. The algorithms developed by the European teams transformed the finds into a gigantic puzzle without borders or a guiding figure, laying the foundation for a technology destined to transform the work of archaeologists.

The project focused on two emblematic cases: the frescoes of the House of the Painters at Work in the Insula dei Casti Amanti, destroyed by the eruption and then further shattered by the bombings of 1943, and those of the Schola Armaturarum, which collapsed in 2010. The digitization, also performed using a portable device created by the Italian Institute of Technology, allowed for the acquisition of 3D models and hyperspectral analyses of approximately two thousand fragments, an essential basis for virtual and physical reconstruction.

For Marcello Pelillo, project coordinator and professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, RePAIR represents a turning point because it streamlines one of the most complex activities in archaeology, freeing up time and resources for scientific research. This vision is shared by the Park's director, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, who emphasizes how AI will become increasingly central to the management of finds, especially in a country where preventive excavations generate enormous amounts of data.