Research on Digital Restoration of Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown of Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tomb Based on AHP and Human–Computer Interaction Technology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The use of digital methods in this reverse engineering process in archaeological aspects (including restoring museum exhibits) is becoming increasingly popular. The present work proposes research on archaeology and digital restoration of the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown of Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tomb based on AHP and human-computer interaction technology. The paper is reasonably properly written (but the article needs a typo-grammatical check).

Here are the main comments about the manuscript which need to be considered:

1)I would like to ask the authors to abstract clarify (in the context of specific values) the obtained research results. In particular, the effects on page 14 regarding the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation are presented. This information is crucial for people who would like to apply the procedure in their research.

2)I have two questions about the procedure itself. One is to clarify the method for acquiring 2D contour. On page 9, the authors refer to the publication, but I would like to ask you to explain this process (two to three sentences). And the second question concerns the acquisition of the geometry of the human body. How did the authors do it (by what method, maybe with a laser scanner?)

3)The discussion chapter needs to be expanded. Therefore a more detailed literature review should be performed to compile the reader how the research in the article relates to the previously conducted research.

4)I would like to ask you to prepare the manuscript in format on the journal's website. It is mainly about the correct reference in the text to literature items, and the references section should also be formatted appropriately.

The authors' most significant research discovery is a detailed description of the reconstruction procedure. It is of extraordinary value because, taking into account the current research conducted in this area, it has not been presented in its entirety. The proposed procedure may be the starting point for a similar reconstruction of archaeological objects. However, please consider my comments, which will allow the manuscript to be clarified.

Author Response

Responses to Reviewers

The authors of this paper would like to express thanks to the reviewer for his valuable comments. The reviewer’s comments are critical to improve the quality of the article. His remarks have been entirely considered in the new version. The main modifications are illustrated in the following. In the revised manuscript, the modified or added parts based on reviewer's comments are marked in yellow.

 

Reviewer1

Reviewer 1’s comment

The use of digital methods in this reverse engineering process in archaeological aspects (including restoring museum exhibits) is becoming increasingly popular. The present work proposes research on archaeology and digital restoration of the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown of Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tomb based on AHP and human-computer interaction technology. The paper is reasonably properly written (but the article needs a typo-grammatical check).

Response:

Thank you for your valuable and thoughtful comments. We have carefully checked and improved the English writing in the revised manuscript.

 

Reviewer 1’s comment 1

• I would like to ask the authors to abstract clarify (in the context of specific values) the obtained research results. In particular, the effects on page 14 regarding the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation are presented. This information is crucial for people who would like to apply the procedure in their research.

Response:

You are right. Thanks for your suggestion. According to the reviewer's suggestion, we have revised the abstract, adding the evaluation results of clothing virtual simulation and the significance of the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method for the evaluation of clothing virtual simulation effect. Please check the text (Line 10-25). This part’s text is also shown as follows:

The modified Text:

In 1972, Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown unearthed from Mawangdui Han Dynasty tomb in Changsha, Hunan Province, received attention from various fields such as archaeology, cultural relics conservation, and textile and costume because of their light texture and exquisite crafts-Manship. However, due to the early unearthed year and imperfect preservation measures, it is increasingly damaged by the influence of the external environment. Therefore, it is urgent to carry out archaeology, restoration and protection of Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown. In this paper, the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown is taken as the research object, and the costume pattern is obtained through the 3D interactive pattern-making technology. Then use the virtual simulation technology to digitally restore the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown in combination with the fabric, color and pattern of the costume. Finally, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy compre-hensive evaluation method are introduced to evaluate the virtual simulation effect of costume. The results show that the virtual simulation effect of Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown is very good. From the results of costume restoration, AHP captures the uncertainty in the process of costume virtual simulation evaluation, quantifies the judgments with weights, reduces the subjectivity of the evaluation process, and provides a scientific and effective method for evaluating the virtual simulation effect of ancient costumes.

 

Reviewer 1’s comment 2

• I have two questions about the procedure itself. One is to clarify the method for acquiring 2D contour. On page 9, the authors refer to the publication, but I would like to ask you to explain this process (two to three sentences). And the second question concerns the acquisition of the geometry of the human body. How did the authors do it (by what method, maybe with a laser scanner?)

Response:

Thanks for your query. It is indeed beneficial for readers to further understand our research.

Firstly, regarding the method of obtaining the 2D contour line, we import the photo of the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown into the drawing software (Adobe Illustrator), extract the outer contour line of the garment, delete the internal structure line except for the contour line, so as to obtain the 2D contour line of the garment. We have added relevant process descriptions as follows (Line 284-290 in the revised manuscript):

Firstly, we adopt the costume construction idea based on Pattern [31] and sketch [32-34], import the photos of Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown into the drawing soft-ware (Adobe Illustrator), extract the outer contour lines of the costume, and delete the internal structure except for the contour lines, so as to obtain the 2D contour line of the costume (Figure 5(b)). The purpose of this step is to obtain the costume outline, and there is no requirement for accurate data on the costume pattern, so the technical re-quirements for the operator can be reduced.

Secondly, regarding the acquisition of human body geometry, the clothing virtual simulation software (CLO Standalone) we use has its own parametric human body model, which can adjust the size of each part of the human body to obtain the required human body. We have added relevant descriptions as follows (Line 318-321 in the revised manuscript):

Firstly, in order to better restore and display the virtual simulation costume, the 3D human body model needs to be adjusted. According to unearthed documents, Xin Zhai, the owner of the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown, is 154cm tall. Therefore, adjust the height of the parametric mannequin that comes with CLO Standalone to 154cm.

 

Reviewer 1’s comment 3

• The discussion chapter needs to be expanded. Therefore a more detailed literature review should be performed to compile the reader how the research in the article relates to the previously conducted research.

Response:

Thanks for your suggestion. It is indeed advantageous for readers to further understand our research. We have expanded the Discussion section and compared the content of this article with that of previous research in conjunction with the content of the literature review. At present, the research on ancient costume restoration mainly focuses on exploring technical means, and there is no unified evaluation standard for the effect of the restoration. The evaluation method combining AHP and the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method proposed in this paper is a scientific method, which makes the evaluation of the restoration results of historical clothing no longer superficial. Please check the text (Line 505-526 in the revised manuscript). This part’s text is also shown as follows:

Mawangdui Han Tomb as a shocking excavation. There are two things that are world-famous. One is a female corpse that has not rotted for thousands of years, and the other is the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown as thin as a cicada's wings. At present, there are many studies on the uncorrupted female corpse and its preservation envi-ronment [5-7], but there are few studies on the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown. From the perspective of scientific and technological archaeology, this paper studies the structure, color, fabric and pattern of the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown and com-bines the pattern-making technology of human-computer interaction and virtual sim-ulation technology to digitally restore the Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown. Compared with the traditional silk fabric protection technology [8,9], the color of the clothes produced by virtual simulation is more vivid and durable. Compared with the tradi-tional digital restoration of rigid cultural relics [16-25], the research method combining reverse engineering and virtual simulation proposed in this paper provides a reference for the digital restoration of flexible cultural relics.

From the perspective of costume archaeology, the restoration of historical cos-tumes requires practitioners to have a rich theoretical basis and practical experience in pattern-making. Therefore, traditional costume restoration has always had the prob-lems of low efficiency, long cycle and poor effect. Pattern-making methods based on patterns and sketches can reduce the difficulty of this method [31-34]. Virtual simula-tion technology provides new ideas for the preservation and dissemination of histori-cal costume [10-15]. However, the above research mainly focuses on delivering digital means for the restoration of ancient costumes and does not propose a unified standard to verify the similarity between the restored costumes and historical prototypes. In this context, this paper...

 

Reviewer 1’s comment 4

• I would like to ask you to prepare the manuscript in format on the journal's website. It is mainly about the correct reference in the text to literature items, and the references section should also be formatted appropriately.

Response:

Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. We have modified the article according to the template given on the journal website.

 

Reviewer 1’s comment 5

The authors' most significant research discovery is a detailed description of the reconstruction procedure. It is of extraordinary value because, taking into account the current research conducted in this area, it has not been presented in its entirety. The proposed procedure may be the starting point for a similar reconstruction of archaeological objects. However, please consider my comments, which will allow the manuscript to be clarified.

Response:

Thanks very much for the reviewer's comments. Your comments are most helpful in improving our paper’s quality. We will try our best to make the manuscript meeting the publishing requirem

Reviewer 2 Report

The presented work focuses on digital restoration of a silk gauze dress related to a Mawangdui Han Dynasty tomb.  Despite the topic is very interesting, this research and presentation have lacks. Please follow the suggestions below:

-          Line 281-287: Please reduce use of the “pattern-making” term, also in all manuscript

-          There are no references referred to the Tomb: who studied and analysed it?

-          Please include inside the manuscript all software you used

-          Please use 2D and 3D instead of 2d and 3d, in all manuscript

-          Would be better to remove “archaeology” from the title. The archaeological aspect is minor.

-          There are different issues and mismatch related to references, images, terms (capitals and tiny letters where it is not needed) please fix them

thank you

Author Response

Responses to Reviewers

The authors of this paper would like to express thanks to the reviewer for his valuable comments. The reviewer’s comments are critical to improve the quality of the article. His remarks have been entirely considered in the new version. The main modifications are illustrated in the following. In the revised manuscript, the modified or added parts based on reviewer's comments are marked in yellow.

 

Reviewer2

Reviewer 2’s comment 2

• Line 281-287: Please reduce use of the “pattern-making” term, also in all manuscript

Response:

You are right. Thanks for your suggestion. The “pattern-making” frequently appears in the manuscript and will appear wordy. We will appropriately delete the “pattern-making” in the article, hoping to achieve the desired effect. Please check the text.

 

Reviewer 2’s comment 3

• There are no references referred to the Tomb: who studied and analysed it?

Response:

Thanks for your query. It is indeed very useful for readers to further understand our research.

Mawangdui Han Tomb is one of the top ten famous ancient tombs in the world. In addition to a large number of buried cultural relics, an unprecedented well-preserved female corpse was unearthed. The female corpse was buried underground for two thousand years without decay. It is a rare miracle in the world and has extremely important value for later biological and medical research. We have added research on unearthed silk books, lacquerware, and tomb chambers, as well as research on unearthed female corpses and their preservation methods in the references. The added text is shown as follows (Line 39-50 in the revised manuscript):

Mawangdui Han Tomb is one of the top ten famous ancient tombs in the world. It was the family cemetery of Changsha Prime Minister Li Cang in the early Western Han Dynasty. Tombs 1-3 are respectively buried Li Cang's wife (Xin Zhai), Li Cang and Li Cang's son. The tomb has undergone three archaeological excavations since 1972, and a total of more than 3,000 cultural relics such as silk fabrics, silk books [1-3], silk paintings, and lacquer [4] wares have been unearthed, providing very important materials for the study of the history, culture, society and life of the Western Han Dynasty. Among the three tombs, Tomb No. 1 is the most civilized due to a well-preserved female corpse unearthed. This female corpse was buried underground for two thousand years without decay. It can be said to be a rare miracle in the world, and it has extremely important value for subsequent biological and medical research [5-7]. The chamber of Tomb No. 1 consists of five parts, including four side chambers for storing items and a central coffin [4].

 

Reviewer 2’s comment 4

• Please include inside the manuscript all software you used

Response:

Thanks for the reviewer’s comment. In this paper, in Section 3.2, the software Adobe illustrator is mainly used to extract clothing contours. Then the software Design Concept is used to draw clothing structure lines to generate 3D surfaces. In Section 3.3, the software CLO Standalone is used to conduct virtual simulation research of clothing. Then use the software Matlab to generate gray-scale images to calculate the pattern area. We have indicated the software used at the corresponding location in the manuscript. Please check the text.

 

Reviewer 2’s comment 5

• Please use 2D and 3D instead of 2d and 3d, in all manuscript

Response:

Thanks very much. We revised them. Please check the revised manuscript.

 

Reviewer 2’s comment 6

• Would be better to remove “archaeology” from the title. The archaeological aspect is minor.

Response:

Thanks. We have removed "archaeology" from the title. Change the title to “Research on digital restoration of Plain Unlined Silk Gauze Gown of Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tomb based on AHP and human-computer interaction technology”.

 

Reviewer 2’s comment 7

• There are different issues and mismatch related to references, images, terms (capitals and tiny letters where it is not needed) please fix them

Response:

Thanks for your valuable counsel. We have read the article carefully and have made corrections based on the reviewers' comments.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

based on latest revisions, the manuscript seems to be fine at this stage