A Virtual Restoration System for Broken Pottery

Aiming to assist the archaeologist to restore excavated sherds, a virtual restoration system for pottery shape relics is developed based on their two characteristic features: symmetry axis and profile. An effective method of estimating the axis of the surface of revolution is presented first; then an approach for computing the complete profile is proposed. Because some pottery contains holes or is constituted of small fragments, it is difficult to compute the complete profile. An effective method is proposed to compute the complete profile by assembling a number of sherds. Meanwhile, in order to ensure a valid match, some human/computer interactions are applied to remove erroneous matches. Finally, texture mapping technology is applied to virtual restored pottery in order to show the pottery more realistically. The proposed methods are applied to the recovery of Yao Zhou’s famous ancient porcelains.