A Review on Computer-Based Methods for Archeological Pottery Classification and Reconstruction

The knowledge of the history, economy, and art of an archeological site is based on information that can be taken from ceramics analysis, classification, and reconstruction. The traditional methods used by the archeologists for their investigation are time-consuming, not reproducible, and repeatable, and the results depend on the subjectivity, specialization, personal skills, and professional experience of the operator. An as consequence, only a few indicative samples that have characteristic components are analyzed with wide uncertainties. In order to overcome these limitations, in the last years, some automatic methods for studying archeological pottery’s findings are proposed in the literature. To help all the researchers involved in this field, this paper aims to provide a complete and critical analysis of the state-of-the-art until the end of 2020 of the published methods on pottery classification and reconstruction from a 3D discrete manifold model. For this purpose, papers in English by the Scopus database are collected by using the following keywords: “computer methods in archaeology”, “3D archaeology”, “3D reconstruction”, “automatic feature recognition and reconstruction”, “3D puzzling”. The list is completed by additional references found through the reading of selected papers. The 35 selected papers are divided into three groups: Geometric model fragment processing, 3D information systems for archaeological pottery visualization and documentation, 3D puzzling of archaeological fragments. The results of the present review are focused on the presentation of the pros and cons of the techniques used on these different issues.