Proposing features for the reconstruction of marble plates of ephesos

The reconstruction of marble plates of Ephesos is discussed in this paper. Automated reconstruction techniques exist for 2 dimensional objects as well as for 3 dimensional objects. Current applications that consider the shape of the fragments only, are able to reconstruct complete objects consisting of no more than e.g. 10 parts. Therefore, additional features are necessary to reconstruct objects with a large number of fragments, or if pieces of different objects are mixed up. This paper presents an overview of currently used 2D features for reconstruction on the example of paper reconstruction, how 3D objects like pottery can be reconstructed and shows how these 2D features can be used for the reassembling of the Ephesos marble plates.

I. Introduction

In general the destruction of objects arise either from catastrophes or accidents (e.g. the collapse of the historical archive of cologne due to construction works [1], earthquakes), from data protection (destruction of data carriers, e.g. documents) or from a time induced degeneration of objects (weathering, abrasion). In archaeology the reassembling of items of cultural and historic value (e.g. broken pottery, see Kampel [2]) is done for historical research, e.g. the studying of cultures, earth history. The forensic deals mainly with the reconstruction of torn [3], [4] or shredded [5], [6], [7] documents. Documents can be destroyed either to suppress crime or for data protection (e.g. medical data, bank data). The Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology Berlin has also developed a system for the reconstruction of shredded paper which has already been used by the german police and tax fraud investigation [8].