Fractured Object Reassembly via Robust Surface Registration

The reassembly of fractured 3D objects from their parts is an important problem in cultural heritage and other domains. We approach reassembly from a geometric matching perspective and propose a pipeline for the automatic solution of the problem, where an efficient and generic three-level coarse-to-fine search strategy is used for the underlying global optimization. Key to the efficiency of our approach is the use of a discretized approximation of the surfaces’ distance field, which significantly reduces the cost of distance queries and allows our method to systematically search the global parameter space with minimal cost. The resulting reassembly pipeline provides highly reliable alignment, as demonstrated through the reassembly of fractured objects from their fragments and the reconstruction of 3D objects from partial scans, showcasing the wide applicability of our methodology.