March 10, Wednesday 14:15, Room 303, Jacobs

Feature curves in range images with application to archeology

Lecturer : Ilan Shimshoni

Lecturer homepage : http://mis.hevra.haifa.ac.il/~ishimshoni/

Affiliation : MIS dept, Haifa University


Abstract:

Archaeological artifacts are of vital importance in archaeological
research. At present there is a drive to scan these artifacts and
store the scanned objects on the internet making them accessible to
the whole research community. We propose a new approach for
automatic processing of these 3D model. Given such an artifact our
first goal is to find edges termed relief edges on the surface. The
3D curves that we defined are the 3D equivalent of Canny Edges in
images. These edges can be used to illustrate the object replacing
the human illustrator or at least helping him produce accurate
illustrations efficiently using an interactive computerized tool.
Based on these curves we have defined a new direction field on
surfaces (a normalized vector field), termed the prominent
field. We demonstrate the applicability of the prominent field in
two applications. The first is surface enhancement if archaeological
artifacts, which helps enhance eroded features and remove scanning
noise. The second is artificial coloring that can replace manual
artifact illustration in archaeological reports.

This work which is on the border between computer vision and
computer graphics is being carried out in cooperation with
archaeologists who help guide the research to make its results
applicable to them.