A Probabilistic Method for Fractured Cultural Relics Automatic Reassembly

Masses of fragile cultural relics are dug out in fragments due to long-standing burying and their fragility, which must be reassembled to play a role in cultural heritage study. However, it is very challenging to automatically reassemble a large collection of fragments of unknown geometric shapes. In this article, a novel probabilistic method for fractured cultural relics automatic reassembly is proposed to solve the problem in terms of good accuracy, efficiency, and robustness. First, a set of matching units are detected and described by the 2D Link-Chain Descriptors (LCD) and the 3D Spatial-Distribution Descriptors (SDD). Second, the pairwise reassembly probability is calculated by combining the similarities of LCD and SDD descriptors, then the collision detection is conducted to eliminate the incorrect overlapping pairs. Finally, a global optimal reassembly solution is obtained by iterative graph optimization with the constrains of the loop-closures and overlap restrictions. Comprehensive experiments with eight challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieved good performance in terms of minor reassembly errors, efficiency and robustness to noise, varying point density and completeness.