Images Enhancement of Ancient Mural Painting of Bey’s Palace Constantine, Algeria and Lacuna Extraction Using Mahalanobis Distance Classification Approach

As a result of human activity and environmental changes, several types of damages may occur to ancient mural paintings; indeed, lacunae, which refer to the area of paint layer loss, are the most prevalent kind. The presence of lacuna is an essential sign of the progress of mural painting deterioration. Most studies have focused on detecting and removing cracks from old paintings. However, lacuna extraction has not received the necessary consideration and is not well-explored. Furthermore, most recent studies have focused on using deep learning for mural protection and restoration, but deep learning requires a large amount of data and computational resources which is not always available in heritage institutions. In this paper, we present an efficient method to automatically extract lacunae and map deterioration from RGB images of ancient mural paintings of Bey’s Palace in Algeria. Firstly, a preprocessing was applied using Dark Channel Prior (DCP) to enhance the quality and improve visibility of the murals. Secondly, a determination of the training sample and pixel’s grouping was assigned to their closest sample based on Mahalanobis Distance (MD) by calculating both the mean and variance of the classes in three bands (R, G, and B), in addition to the covariance matrix of all the classes to achieve lacuna extraction of the murals. Finally, the accuracy of extraction was calculated. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can achieve a conspicuously high accuracy of 94.33% in extracting lacunae from ancient mural paintings, thus supporting the work of a specialist in heritage institutions in terms of the time- and cost-consuming documentation process.