Automatic archaeological fragment reconstruction using hierarchical depth maps

Reconstruction of ancient artifacts from fragments found at archaeological sites is a tedious task that requires a great human effort and that, during decades, has been manual. In this paper, a new technique is introduced to face, automatically, this kind of problems. Taking as input data 3D models of the fragments, and using a characterization based in hierarchical depth maps, the rigid transformation that maximizes the contact surface between fragments is calculated, and pondered by an statistical quality measure. In order to ensure global correction of achieved results, and to reduce execution time, the purposed technique hierarchically evaluates the correspondence using an optimistic estimator. This estimator ensures convergency to the optimal solution. This way, the proposed algorithm can be used as a global registration technique and as a local one.