Automatic petrographic feature extraction from pottery of archaeological interest

The concept of fabric, defined by the description and classification method introduced by Whitbread (1995), has been usually used to perform petrographic studies of thin sections of ancient ceramics. This work analyzes pottery of archaeological interest by making use of image processing algorithms. First a preliminary petrographic analysis has been quantitatively performed by point counter stage. Afterward our attention has been focused on the automatic identification of structural and textural components of the potteries through optical microscopy. Image analysis techniques have been then used to automatically classify the image component into three classes: inclusions, voids and groundmass. Preliminary results, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach: petrographic data collection becomes faster with respect to traditional method providing also quantitative information useful for fabric recognition.