An automated pottery archival and reconstruction system

Motivated by the current requirements of archaeologists, we are developing an automated archival system for archaeological classification and reconstruction of ceramics. Our system uses the profile of an archaeological fragment, which is the cross-section of the fragment in the direction of the rotational axis of symmetry, to classify and reconstruct it virtually. Ceramic fragments are recorded automatically by a 3D measurement system based on structured (coded) light. The input data for the estimation of the profile is a set of points produced by the acquisition system. By registering the front and the back views of the fragment the profile is computed and measurements like diameter, area percentage of the complete vessel, height and width are derived automatically. We demonstrate the method and give results on synthetic and real data. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.