Virtual reconstruction of broken and unbroken pottery

Motivated by the requirements of the present archaeology, we are developing an automated system for archaeological classification and reconstruction of ceramics. Due to the nature of ceramics, most of the excavated vessels are in the form of fragments called sherds. Only a few of the finds are complete, however these finds are the most important and interesting ones. Therefore we are developing a system that handles both complete and broken vessels using two different reconstruction strategies: A shape from silhouette based method for complete vessels and a profile based method for fragments. The profile is the cross-section of the fragment in the direction of the rotational axis of symmetry and can be represented by a closed curve in the plane. For complete vessels the 3D reconstruction is based on a sequence of images of the object taken from different viewpoints. Then the output of both algorithms is used to construct the 3D model of the vessel for classification and display.