Cleavage Site Detection in Broken 3D Objects

This paper presents an efficient surface inspection algorithm for cleavage site detection in broken 3D objects. Presented algorithm is intended to be used as a preprocessing stage for broken object reassembly. It helps reduce the area to be matched drastically by marking only the broken part of the surface resulting in much faster matches. The algorithm captures differences in the geometric structure in different parts of the 3D object represented by polygon meshes. These differences are used to find most probable cleavage/fracture sites. The presented approach is robust and the computations are simple making it time efficient, easy to implement and applicable to all triangulated surface data even in presence of noise. The algorithm finds extensive use in the field of computer vision, archeology, and computer aided orthopedic surgery etc. Index Terms-- Cleavage site detection, Roughness Estimation, 3D meshes.