Shape Morphing and Reconstruction Using A Self-Organizing Feature Map

The shape reconstruction process has remained an active research area in archaeology, paleontology, forensics, cultural heritage restoration and art conservation. In all these cases, the reconstruction process is tedious and time consuming. Aside from collecting several randomly mixed fragments, the fragments also have to be glued together. A stable and efficient algorithm for computer aided reconstruction of fragmented models is introduced in this paper. This novel approach is based on the morphing technique using the deformable self organizing feature map (SOFM). The SOFM is a skeletal framework for modeling surfaces that dynamically change shape. The lattice of the SOFM is a spherical map that maintains the relative connectivity of the neighboring nodes as it transforms under external and internal forces. The digitized fragments are assigned weight vectors and morphed into the weight vectors of the original model. The technique is illustrated by reconstructing the geometry of a complete vase from the surface data acquired from several fragmented pieces.