TEXMET: A Deep Learning Benchmark for Archaeological Textile Reconstruction
The reconstruction of fragmented historical textiles presents a significant challenge in computational archaeology. The Oseberg ship burial, dating to 834 CE, yielded hundreds of degraded textile fragments that have resisted systematic computational analysis. While deep learning has revolutionized image-based puzzle solving, progress on archaeological textiles has been limited by the lack of domain-specific datasets and systematic evaluation of modern architectures. To address this gap, we present TEXMET, a curated dataset of 18,644 historical textile images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection, representing the first textile-specific benchmark for puzzle-solving research. Using TEXMET, we conduct a systematic evaluation of three state-of-the-art puzzle-solving models: JPDVT, FCViT, and DiffAssemble. Our experiments reveal that the transformer-based models pre-trained on standard datasets fail to generalize to textiles, but domain-specific fine-tuning proves highly effective. The graph-based DiffAssemble model, when fine-tuned on TEXMET, achieves 85.89% puzzle accuracy on textile data. Most significantly, applying this fine-tuned model to 45 highly degraded Oseberg fragments yields a performance increase from 26.67% to 64.44% puzzle accuracy. These results establish TEXMET as a new benchmark for textile reconstruction and demonstrate that domain adaptation is essential for applying puzzle-solving methods to imagery of real archaeological materials.