A System for High-Volume Acquisition and Matching of Fresco Fragments: Reassembling Theran Wall Paintings

Abstract

Although mature technologies exist for acquiring images, geometry, and normals of small objects, they remain cumbersome and time-consuming for non-experts to employ on a large scale. In an archaeological setting, a practical acquisition system for routine use on every artifact and fragment would open new possibilities for archiving, analysis, and dissemination. We present an inexpensive system for acquiring all three types of information, and associated metadata, for small objects such as fragments of wall paintings. The acquisition system requires minimal supervision, so that a single, non-expert user can scan at least 10 fragments per hour. To achieve this performance, we introduce new algorithms to robustly and automatically align range scans, register 2-D scans to 3-D geometry, and compute normals from 2-D scans. As an illustrative application, we present a novel 3-D matching algorithm that efficiently searches for matching fragments using the scanned geometry.

Citation Style:    Display Alpha ACM SIGGRAPH IEEEtran Publication

A System for High-Volume Acquisition and Matching of Fresco Fragments: Reassembling Theran Wall Paintings. Benedict Brown, Corey Toler-Franklin, Diego Nehab, Michael Burns, Andreas Vlachopoulos, Christos Doumas, David Dobkin, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Tim Weyrich. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 84:1–84:9, Los Angeles, CA, 2008.Benedict Brown, Corey Toler-Franklin, Diego Nehab, Michael Burns, Andreas Vlachopoulos, Christos Doumas, David Dobkin, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Tim Weyrich. A system for high-volume acquisition and matching of fresco fragments: Reassembling theran wall paintings. ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2008), 27(3):84:1–84:9, 2008.Brown, B., Toler-Franklin, C., Nehab, D., Burns, M., Vlachopoulos, A., Doumas, C., Dobkin, D., Rusinkiewicz, S., and Weyrich, T. 2008. A system for high-volume acquisition and matching of fresco fragments: Reassembling theran wall paintings. ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2008) 27, 3, 84:1–84:9.B. Brown, C. Toler-Franklin, D. Nehab, M. Burns, A. Vlachopoulos, C. Doumas, D. Dobkin, S. Rusinkiewicz, and T. Weyrich, “A system for high-volume acquisition and matching of fresco fragments: Reassembling theran wall paintings,” ACM Trans. on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH 2008), vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 84:1–84:9, 2008. PDF Video Princeton Press Release BibTeX DOI

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our collaborators, the conservators and archaeologists at the Akrotiri Excavation Laboratory of Wall Paintings: Vassilis Dimitropoulos, Manolis Hamaoui, Litsa Kalambouki, Marina Papapetrou, Panagiotis Vlachos, Alexandros Zokos (conservators); Iakovos Michailidis (chief conservator); Fragoula Georma, and Niki Spanou (archaeologists). They have generously provided access, time, and cooperation in support of this project. Many of our colleagues at Princeton have also contributed invaluable effort, support and suggestions: Matt Plough, Phil Shilane, Joshua Podolak, Xiaojuan Ma, Tom Funkhouser, and the whole Tiggraph gang. We also thank Marshall Brown and Paul Calamia for the help in editing the paper. Funding has come from the Kress Foundation, the Seeger Foundation, the Thera Foundation, the Cotsen Family Foundation, and NSF Grants CCF-0347427 and CCF-0702580. We especially thank Dimitris Gondicas and Peter Nomikos Jr. for their enthusiasm and help in getting the project off the ground.