HINDSITE: A user-interactive framework for fragment assembly

The assembly of fragments into vessels is a significant task in the analysis of archaeological finds. The current method of reconstruction which relies on experts is time-consuming and laborious, and leads only to a fraction of reconstructions possible. Automated tools have been able to assemble at most two or three dozen fragments, while in practice, archaeologists deal with hundreds and thousands of fragments, in the context of missing fragments and fragments mixed in from different vessels. This limitation is mainly due to the exponential increase in the number of possible assembly configurations as the number of fragments increases, and as the path to successful assembly is impeded by missing fragments. This combinatorial explosion can partially be addressed by improving fragment pair matching, but not all archaeological cues can be captured in an automated system. We propose a interactive, expert-guided framework for fragment assembly, HINDSITE, built on a backbone of a web-based database system, whose architecture is independent of the particular fragment pair matching scheme used. The relational database stores fragments, fragment pairs, and partial assemblies as well as algorithms for pairwise fragment matching and for constructing assemblies, incorporates user interaction at each stage, and allows for automated experiments to optimize assembly parameters. We show that HINDSITE can reconstruct a few dozens of vessel fragments even in the presence of extra and missing pieces.