GCH 2024 - Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage

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https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/3607042

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    Computer-Assisted Collaborative Fragment Matching of Incomplete Stone Artifacts
    (The Eurographics Association, 2024) Houska, Peter; Masur, Alessandra; Kloiber, Simon; Lengauer, Stefan; Karl, Stephan; Preiner, Reinhold; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, Hasan
    Archaeological artifacts are often only preserved in fragments. Their reassembly is thus a common task for conservators and archaeologists. Unfortunately, this reassembly process is anything but trivial. Major complicating factors are given if fragments are (1) eroded and weathered, (2) incomplete and missing, and (3) expose little to no geometric surface features or surface-color variations. Artifacts made of white marble, which was generally used in antiquity, pose an additional challenge for reassembly due to (4) their weight and (5) the fragility of the crystalline material. This holds for both freestanding marble sculptures and relief stones or otherwise decorated slabs. In this work, we focus on the reassembly problem of marble slabs with a flat surface, for which fragments are pre-oriented such that their top faces point upward. While computer-based reassembly algorithms exist, they are typically tuned for specific types of artifacts and rely on joining fragments based on a combination of a geometric and surface-color correspondence. Hence, methods that reassemble broken and deteriorated white marble slabs typically perform worse than the respective domain experts. Due to the foreseeable shortcomings of reassembly algorithms when applied to eroded, incomplete, and widely feature-less white marble fragments, we refrain from designing an algorithm for the specific problem at hand. Instead, we incorporate a large number of users from the broad public in the reassembly process. To that end, we provide an intuitive interactive web platform that allows users access to 3D digital twins of the Christian marble-slab fragments. Transferring the fragments to the virtual domain also enables the introduction of algorithmic automatisms to assist the users in the process. In this paper, we present the system design and the provided basic geometric automatisms, and report on their efficiency and utilization in an ongoing large-scale citizen-science experiment that involves several thousand users.