Automated Profile Extraction of Archaeological Fragments

Thousands of fragments of ceramics are found at archaeological excavation sites. Till today archaeologists have drawn and classified them manually. This method is very time consuming and classification depends on the experiences of the archaeologists. Therefore we developed a system that speeds up this process by using a 3D-scanner for the acquisition and a software that generates a registered 3D-model of the sherd. The features for classification used by archaeologists and a 3D reconstruction of the unbroken vessel are estimated automatically. The registration of different views of the sherd are based on the estimation of the rotational axis by a Hough inspired method. The classification and reconstruction is done by extraction of the longest profile line, which is an intersection of the sherd along the rotational axis of the unbroken vessel. The extracted features for classification are diameters, heights and their relation to each other. These features are estimated by the use of extremal points of the profile line. Results of the system developed are presented for both synthetic and real input data. 1This work was partly supported by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) under grant P13385-INF, the European Union under grant IST-1999-20273 and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.