TESSERAE3D: A benchmark for tesserae semantic segmentation in 3D point clouds

3D point cloud of mosaic tesserae is used by heritage researchers, restorers, and archaeologists for digital investigations. Information extraction, pattern analysis, and semantic assignment are necessary to complement geometric information. Automated processes that can speed up the task are highly sought after, especially new supervised approaches. However, the availability of labeled data necessary for training supervised learning models is a significant constraint. This paper introduces Tesserae3D, a 3D point cloud benchmark dataset for training and evaluating machine learning models, applied to mosaic tesserae segmentation. It is a publicly available, very high density and colored dataset, accompanied by a standard multi-class semantic segmentation baseline. It consists of about 502 million points and contains 11 semantic classes covering a wide range of tesserae types. We propose a semantic segmentation baseline building on radiometric and covariance features fed to ensemble learning methods. The results delineate an achievable 89% F1 score and are made available under https://github.com/akharroubi/Tesserae3D, providing a simple interface to improve the score based on feedback from the research community.