Interactive reconstruction of archaeological fragments in a collaborative environment

The automatic reassembling of archaeological artefacts from a collection of fragments is a crucial problem in archaeology. It is arduous and time-consuming because the available information, in the form of fragments, is limited and "noisy". Previous research to assist in reassembly of artefacts has largely focused on either pattern-recognition or augmented-visualisation based perspectives. This paper presents a computer-aided and collaborative system for the reconstruction of archaeological artefacts, using boundarymatching estimation by string registration. The system has three key components. It uses invariant features to represent the 3D boundary curves of fragments. It utilises robust string matching to search the globally optimal alignment so as to tolerate noise. To further handle limited and noisy information, it creates a collaborative environment to allow multiple archaeologists to remotely reassemble artefacts at the same time. A series of experiments verify the acceptable performance of the system as well as its components.