A recovery system of broken relics using least squares fitting and vector similarity techniques

We propose a new system for recovering the broken fragments of relics into an original form. This paper presents a system with an application to tombstones—objects of flat plane with letters carved in—for assembling the fragments by placing their respective fragments in the right position. The matching process contains three sub-processes: aligning the front and letters of an object, identifying the matching directions, and determining the detailed matching positions. We apply least squares fitting and vector similarity methods to the matching process. It turned out that 2D translations via fragments-alignment enable us to save the computational load significantly. Based on experimental results from the damaged cultural fragments, the performance of the proposed method is illustrated. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.