# Synthetic Craquelure Generation for Unsupervised Painting Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12742 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12742/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [V-Net: Fully Convolutional Neural Networks for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04797/) (2016)
- [Image Segmentation Using Text and Image Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10003/) (2021)
- [Large-scale Classification of Fine-Art Paintings: Learning The Right Metric on The Right Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00855/) (2015)
- [Diffuse, Attend, and Segment: Unsupervised Zero-Shot Segmentation using Stable Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12469/) (2023)
- [Bilateral Reference for High-Resolution Dichotomous Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03407/) (2024)
- [Bringing Old Photos Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09484/) (2020)
- [Frequency-aware Feature Fusion for Dense Image Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12879/) (2024)
- [Pik-Fix: Restoring and Colorizing Old Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01902/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cultural heritage preservation increasingly demands non-invasive digital methods for painting restoration, yet identifying and restoring fine craquelure patterns from complex brushstrokes remains challenging due to scarce pixel-level annotations. We propose a fully annotation-free framework driven by a domain-specific synthetic craquelure generator, which simulates realistic branching and tapered fissure geometry using B'ezier trajectories. Our approach couples a classical morphological detector with a learning-based refinement module: a SegFormer backbone adapted via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Uniquely, we employ a detector-guided strategy, injecting the morphological map as an input spatial prior, while a masked hybrid loss and logit adjustment constrain the training to focus specifically on refining candidate crack regions. The refined masks subsequently guide an Anisotropic Diffusion inpainting stage to reconstruct missing content. Experimental results demonstrate that our pipeline significantly outperforms state-of-the-art photographic restoration models in zero-shot settings, while faithfully preserving the original paint brushwork.