Classification of friezes engraved on ceramic sherds from 3D scans

Abstract

A large corpus of ceramic sherds dating from High Middle Ages has been extracted in Saran (France). The sherds have an engraved frieze made by the potter with a carved wooden wheel, used as a dating to study the dissemination of productions. ARCADIA project aims to develop an automatic classification of this archaeological heritage. The sherds are scanned using a 3D laser scanner. Then, a binary pattern is extracted after projecting the 3D point cloud into a depth map. Gabor filters and bag-of-words are compared as inputs for training a SVM classifier by selecting the pattern as a region of interest. On a database of 377 representative sherds, the recognition rates are about 74% on binary patterns extracted from the 3D scans. Even if the recognition remains below that obtained with manual stampings carried out by the archaeologist, he already saves a lot of time in archiving.