Prominent field for shape processing of archaeological artifacts

Archaeological artifacts are of vital importance in archaeological research. We propose a new approach for automatic processing of scanned artifacts. It is based on the definition of a new direction field on surfaces (a normalized vector field), termed the prominent field. We demonstrate the applicability of the prominent field in two applications. The first is surface enhancement if archaeological artifacts, which helps enhance eroded features and remove scanning noise. The second is artificial coloring that can replace manual artifact illustration in archaeological reports.