Investigation on traditional and modern ceramic documentation

Archaeology is at a point where it can benefit greatly from the application of computer vision methods, and in turn provides a large number of new, challenging and interesting conceptual problems and data for computer science. This is true in particular in the study of ceramics - the most abundant and widespread of all archaeological finds. The traditional way of documenting archaeological sherds is to draw the profile line, which is the intersection of a sherd along the axis of symmetry. A profilograph is a mechanical device, which can directly acquire and transfer a profile line by pin-pointing the profile on a sherd to a computer. We developed a fully automated vision system, which is able to compute the profile line out of the acquired 3D model of the fragment. In this paper we want to give a thorough comparison between the traditional manual approach, the profilograph and our system and present an improvement of the robustness of our approach by finding circular rills on the fragments. Practical experiments have been undertaken at the excavation Tel Dor in Israel.