From Reassembly to Object Completion

Abstract

The problem of the restoration of broken artifacts, where large parts could be missing, is of high importance in archaeology. The typical manual restoration can become a tedious and error-prone process, which also does not scale well. In recent years, many methods have been proposed for assisting the process, most of which target specialized object types or operate under very strict constraints. We propose a digital shape restoration pipeline consisting of proven, robust methods for automatic fragment reassembly and shape completion of generic three-dimensional objects of arbitrary type. In this pipeline, first we introduce a novel unified approach for handling the reassembly of objects from heavily damaged fragments by exploiting both fracture surfaces and salient features on the intact sides of fragments, when available. Second, we propose an object completion procedure based on generalized symmetries and a complementary part extraction process that is suitable for driving the fabrication of missing geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using real-world fractured objects and software implemented as part of the European Union--funded PRESIOUS project, which is also available for download from the project site.