Profile-based Pottery Reconstruction

A major obstacle to the broader use of 3D object reconstruction and modeling is the extent of manual intervention needed. Such interventions are currently extensive and exist throughout every phase of a 3D reconstruction project: collection of images, image management, establishment of sensor position and image orientation, extracting the geometric information describing an object, and merging geometric, texture and semantic data. We present a fully automated approach to pottery reconstruction based on the fragment profile, which is the cross-section of the fragment in the direction of the rotational axis of symmetry. We demonstrate the method and give results on synthetic and real data.