ARCA 2.0: Automatic Recognition of Color for Archaeology through a Web-Application

ARCA stands for Automatic Recognition of Color for Archaeology. Color specification is a common and critical issue for archaeologists, motivated by the need to identify and catalogue color names. For these purposes, Munsell Soil Color Charts (MSCCs) are widely employed. However, archaeologists are used to perform color specification by visual means, through a procedure that was proved to be time consuming, subjective and error-prone. In its first version, ARCA has been presented as the products of our project to realize an application that could be objective and easy to use directly in the excavation sites. In this paper, we present ARCA 2.0: A totally reshaped method for color specification relying onto empiric transformations specifically tuned for cultural heritage color specification. As in the previous version, ARCA 2.0 is made for RGB to HVC (Munsell) color conversion. We validate and assess the newer method, releasing a set of coefficients that can be used by other researchers for color specification tasks. We also present a demo of the web application based onto experimental results achieved during this research.