Semi-Automatic Geometry-Driven Reassembly of Fractured Archeological Objects

3D laser scanning of broken cultural heritage content is becoming increasingly popular, resulting in large col- lections of detailed fractured archeological 3D objects that have to be reassembled virtually. In this paper, we present a new semi-automatic reassembly approach for pairwise matching of the fragments, that makes it possible to take into account both the archeologist's expertise, as well as the power of automatic geometry-driven match- ing algorithms. Our semi-automatic reassembly approach is based on a real-time interaction loop: an expert user steadily specifies approximate initial relative positions and orientations between two fragments by means of a bimanual tangible user interface. These initial poses are continuously corrected and validated in real-time by an algorithm based on the Iterative Closest Point (ICP): the potential contact surface of the two fragments is identi- fied by efficiently pruning insignificant areas of a pair of two bounding sphere hierarchies, that is combined with a k-d tree for closest vertex queries. The locally optimal relative pose for the best match is robustly estimated by taking into account the distance of the closest vertices as well as their normals. We provide feedback to the user by a visual representation of the locally optimal best match and its associated error. Our first results on a concrete dataset show that our system is capable of assisting an expert user in real-time during the pairwise matching of downsampled 3D fragments.