Assisting Pottery Restoration Procedures with Digital Technologies

Abstract

The fragmentary nature of pottery is considered a common place. Conservators are requested to apply a proper restoration solution by taking under consideration a wide range of morphological features and physicochemical properties that derive from the artefact itself. In this work, the authors discuss on a low-cost pottery-oriented restoration pipeline that is based on the exploitation of technologies such as 3D digitisation, data analysis, processing and printing. The pipeline uses low-cost commercial and open source software tools and on the authors' previously published 3D pose normalisation algorithm that was initially designed for 3D vessel shape matching. The authors objectively evaluate the pipeline by applying it on two ancient Greek vessels of the Hellenistic period. The authors describe in detail the involved procedures such as the photogrammetric 3D digitisation, the 3D data analysis and processing, the 3D printing procedures and the synthetic shreds post processing. They quantify the pipeline's applicability and efficiency in terms of cost, knowledge overhead and other aspects related to restoration tasks.