Automatic Matching of Sculpture Fragments as Modern Tool for Archaeological Verification of Hypotheses on Their Origin

The paper presents the final part of the research project carried out by authors, concerning use of photogrammetric approaches to support the archaeological hypotheses on the origin of various sculptures. Connection of the separate pieces to the complete sculptures would allow to identify more accurately their origin. The first part of this research, presented already by the authors in 2006 during the ISPRS Symposium of Comm. V, was related to photogrammetric reconstruction of thirty three 3D models of contact surfaces for pieces of the broken sculptures. Automatic matching of 3D models of contact surfaces of each two adjoining parts can be executed by extraction of various features describeing both surfaces. The proposed method is based on similarity function, which makes use of features directly resulted from geometric shapes. The objective function is described by two components; the first relates to average distance between two surfaces and the second to compensation of different size of the matched surfaces. Algorithm and computer programme elaborated by authors, were tested on base of matching of two contact surfaces of the test-granite stone and afterwards on surfaces of pieces of some museum sculptures. Within this research, a concept of special sculpture’database was also designed. The presented research, sponsored by the Polish State Committee for Research has been already completed and accepted.