Color Calibration for Pre-Classification of Pottery

Every archaeological excavation must deal with a vast number of ceramic fragments. The documentation, administration and scientific processing of these fragments represent a temporal, personnel, and financial problem. We are developing an automated classification and reconstruction system for archaeological fragments. The goal is to relate different fragments belonging to the same vessel based on shape, material and color, thus the color information is important in the pre-classification process. In this work a color specification technique is proposed, which exploits the fact that the spectral reflectance of materials like archaeological fragments vary slow in the visible spectrum. We explain how the acquisition system is calibrated in order to get accurate colorimetric information with respect to archaeological requirements. Experimental results are presented for archaeological objects and for a set of test color patches.