Pairwise Matching of Stone Tools Based on Flake-Surface Contour Points and Normals

Stone tools constitute the main artifacts facilitating archaeological research of the Paleolithic era. The reassembly of stone tools is the most important research work for analyzing human activities of that period. In recent decades, large numbers of methods have been presented to solve various registration or matching problems for point clouds; however, few methods have been successfully applied to the matching of flakes, a type of stone tool. Therefore, we propose a new matching method for studying stone tools to improve archaeological research. Our method processes pairwise matching of stone tools based on contour points and mean normals of regions on all flake surfaces, according to the characteristics of the flake models. The sample experiments conducted in this study indicate that our new method achieves superior matching results for flakes, compared with the existing methods.