Automatic reconstruction of ancient Portuguese tile panels

Portuguese tile panels, or azulejos, are one of Portugal’s cultural icons, and a representative cultural heritage of this country. Portugal’s museums currently have a large collection of loose tiles that are often reassembled manually, which represents a laborious and challenging work. In this article, we explore the problem of automatically reconstructing ancient tile panels, mapping this problem to the reconstruction of an image from an unordered collection of rectangular non-overlapping tiles, an interest and important formulation of the jigsaw puzzle problem. Here we analyze, in a preliminary study, the application of image puzzle solvers in the assembling of ancient tile panels provided by the National Tile Museum. We compare the obtained results in different formulations of the problem, depending on the prior knowledge – known or unknown panel dimension and tile orientation –, and with missing tiles.