Accurately Estimating Sherd 3D Surface Geometry with Application to Pot Reconstruction

This paper deals with the problem of precise automatic es-timation of the surface geometry of pot sherds uncovered at archaeological excavation sites using dense 3D laser-scan data. Critical to ceramic fragment analysis is the ability to geometrically classify excavated sherds, and, if possible, re-construct the original pots using the sherd fragments. To do this, archaelogists must estimate the pot geometry in terms of an axis and associated prole curve from the discovered fragments. In this paper, we discuss an automatic method for accurately estimating an axis/prole curve pair for each archeological sherd (even when they are small) based on axially symmetric implicit polynomial surface models. Our method estimates the axis/prole curve for a sherd by nd-ing the axially symmetric algebraic surface which best t