Interactive segmentation of rock-art in high-resolution 3D reconstructions

Petroglyphs (rock engravings) are important artifacts for the documentation and analysis of early human life. Recent improvements in 3D scanning and 3D reconstruction enable the accurate 3D reconstruction of petroglyphs from rock surfaces at sub-millimeter resolution. To enable the indexing, matching, and recognition of petroglyphs in petroglyph databases, the shapes must first be segmented from the reconstructed rock surface. The absence of robust 3D segmentation methods for petroglyphs leaves a gap in the digital processing workflow. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic method for petroglyph segmentation for high-resolution 3D surface reconstructions. A comprehensive evaluation shows that our method is able to robustly segment petroglyphs with high accuracy and that the incorporation of 3D information is crucial to solve the segmentation problem. The presented method represents a major step towards the completion of a full 3D digital processing workflow of petroglyphs.