Automated 3D Recording of Archaeological Pottery
Martin Kampel , Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Robert Sablatnig , Vienna University of Technology, Austria

Session: Technology: 3D Acquisition and Modeling

At excavations, a large number of sherds of archaeological pottery is found. Since the documentation and administration of these fragments represent a temporal and personnel effort, we construct a computer aided documentation system for archaeological fragments to form the basis for a subsequent semi-automatic classification and reconstruction.

In archaeology the determination of the exact volume of arbitrary vessels is of importance since this provides information about the manufacturer and the usage of the vessel. The technique used for the 3d-acquisition is shape from silhouette. The major problem of the 3d surface reconstruction using a turntable is the varying resolution in direction to the camera due to the varying rotation of object points in respect to the rotational axis of the turntable.

Therefore, the optimal set of views for capturing the viewable object surface is a set of angles, which guarantees a uniform object resolution. In this paper we present a technique which estimates the next angle dynamically, depending on the entropy of the silhouette actually acquired. The relation proposed guarantees a uniform object resolution on one side and a minimal number of acquisition steps on the other side. The method has been tested on synthetic and real data with reasonably good results. The paper concludes with a presentation of results and an outlook on future work.

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