October 2002
We present a method for automatically reconstructing 2D archaeological fragments such as the ones recovered during recent expeditions to the Temple at Petra in Jordan. The first part of the problem involves pairwise matching of fragments in order to find fragments that were adjacent in the original object. This is done by using a modified elastic curve-matching technique to identify portions of fragment boundaries which are similar and assign them a similarity value. In the second part of the problem, we attempt to rebuild the object by searching for a globally optimal arrangement of fragments. This is done by rank-ordering the pairwise matches and using a best-first search method. Because of its enormous complexity, we constrain the problem by using techniques that rely on certain key properties of fractured materials such as triple junctions and corners. In addition we introduce a method for enhancing pairwise matching by using color and texture information from the fragment image.
* This is a summary of Jonah's Masters thesis he just submitted to the Division of Engineering.
Last Updated: Oct. 3, 2002