Automated Documentation System for Pottery

Motivated by the requirements of the present archaeology, we are developing an automated documentation system for archaeological classification and reconstruction of ceramics. Our system works with the profile of an archaeological fragment, which is the cross-section of the fragment in the direction of the rotational axis of symmetry. Ceramic fragments are recorded automatically by a 3D-measurement system based on structured (coded) light. The input data for the estimation of the profile is a set of points produced by the acquisition system. Classification is based on the segmentation of the estimated profile line. We demonstrate the method and give results on synthetic and real data