All images are taken from 'Bild der Wissenschaft 08/2010'

The problem of having to reconstruct shredded documents is often faced by historians and forensic investigators. For instance, there is currently ongoing work on reassembling documents related to the Stasi which was the secret police of the GDR.

However, reconstructing documents is a difficult and laborious job due to the large number of permutations of fragment arrangements. For this reason, this project deals with the automation of the reassembly process, which incorporates the use of various local image features as well as combinatorial optimization strategies.
Our approach is evaluated on a real world dataset consisting of magazine pages that have been shredded by hand.

For more information please contact  Fabian Richter.

References:

• Fabian Richter, Christian Eggert, Rainer Lienhart.
  Fisher Vector Encoding of Micro Color Features for (Real World) Jigsaw Puzzles,
  International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 2015 [ IEEE Xplore]
• Fabian Richter, Christian X. Ries, Rainer Lienhart.
  Evaluation of Discriminative Models for the Reconstruction of Hand-Torn Documents,
  Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV), Singapore, November 2014. [ PDF ] Published by Springer, [ link.springer.com]
• Fabian Richter, Christian X. Ries, Stefan Romberg, Rainer Lienhart.
  Partial Contour Matching for Document Pieces with Content-Based Prior,
  IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2014 (ICME), Chengdu, July 2014. [ PDF ] [ IEEE Xplore]
• Fabian Richter, Christian X. Ries, Nicolas Cebron, Rainer Lienhart.
  Learning to Reassemble Shredded Documents,
  IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2012 [ DOI 10.1109/TMM.2012.2235415]
• Fabian Richter, Christian X. Ries, Rainer Lienhart.
  A Graph Algorithmic Framework for the Assembly of Shredded Documents,
  IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2011 (ICME11), Barcelona, July 2011
  Also Technical Report 2011-05, University of Augsburg, Institute of Computer Science, March 2011 [ PDF ]