Virtual Archaeologist: assembling the past

We present a complete method, encapsulated in our Virtual Archaeologist system, for the full reconstruction of archaeological finds from 3D scanned fragments. Virtual Archaeologist is designed to assist archaeologists in reconstructing monuments or smaller finds by avoiding unnecessary manual experimentation with fragile and often heavy fragments. An automated procedure cannot completely replace the archaeology expert, but provides a useful estimation of valid fragment combinations, and accurately measures fragment matches. In Virtual Archaeologist, we regard the reconstruction problem from a general, geometric point of view, relying on the broken surface morphology to determine correct matches between fragments.