Document Reconstruction Based on Feature Matching

We describe a procedure for reconstructing documents that have been shredded by hand, a problem that often arises in forensics. The proposed method first applies a polygonal approximation in order to reduce the complexity of the boundaries and then extracts relevant features of the polygon to carry out the local reconstruction. In this way the overall complexity can be dramatically reduced because few features are used to perform the matching. The ambiguities resulting from the local reconstruction are resolved and the pieces are merged together as we search for a global solution. We demonstrated through comprehensive experiments that this feature-matching-based procedure produces interesting results for the problem of document reconstruction.