A 3D Pottery Content Based Retrieval Method

Archaeology is a science that is based on perception and similarity comparisons and thus 3D content based retrieval can be used as a research tool. In this paper, we present a descriptor which can be used for content based retrieval of 3D pottery. The descriptor carries morphological features which are extracted from a set of sequential plane-based contours which are vertical to the vessel’s axis of symmetry. The feature extraction is performed after the completion of a pre-processing phase, which involves scale and pose normalisation of the vessel. The latter is a recursive algorithm that takes advantage of the rotational symmetry property found in vessels. We developed a software tool that implements the above and we performed initial testing on vessel’s main body shape matching using a 3D vessel database composed by both manually modelled and digitised 3D artefacts.