Automated Reconstruction of Fragmented , 1600 B . C . Wall Paintings

In this paper a novel general methodology is introduced for the computer-aided reconstruction of the magnificent wall-paintings of the Greek island Thera, painted in the middle of the second millennium BC. These wall-paintings are excavated in fragments and, as a result, their reconstruction is a painstaking and a time-consuming process. Therefore, in order to facilitate and speed up this process a proper system has been developed based on the introduced methodology. According to this methodology each fragment is photographed, its picture is introduced to the computer, its contour is obtained and subsequently all fragments contours are compared in a manner proposed herein. Both the system and the methodology presented here, extract the maximum possible information from the contour shape of fragments of an arbitrary initially unbroken plane object, to point out possible fragments matching. This methodology has been applied to reconstruct, for the first time, unpublished wall-paintings parts from a set of 936 fragments. Key Words: Contour-shape image reconstruction, image processing, jigsaw puzzle automatic solving, computers in archaeology, reconstruction of fragmented wall-paintings