An Automatic Method for Geometric and Morphological Information Extraction and Archiving of Ceramic Finds

The study of potteries is still today almost entirely performed manually by archaeologists. The primary limits of the traditional approach are lack of repeatability in the results, the time required for the analysis and difficulty in exchanging information between researchers. Taking advantage of the previous research results obtained by the Authors in this field, a fully automated procedure for the analysis and cataloguing of potteries is presented in this paper. The procedure allows performing the geometric and semantic analysis of sherds, starting from their 3D scanned model. The method can also determine a set of meaningful measurements of the analyzed sherds and classify them according to the analysis results. Finally, the results are collected into a public and web-based application, which can be interacted with by interested people.