Anatomy Changes and Virtual Restoration of Statues

Abstract

Restoration of archaeological artefacts is an important task for cultural heritage preservation. However traditional restoration processes are difficult, costly and sometimes risky for the artefact itself, due to poor restoration choices for example. To avoid this, it is interesting to turn to virtual restoration, which allows to test restoration hypotheses, that can be later carried out on the real artefact. In this paper, we introduce a restoration framework for completing missing parts of archaeological statues, with a focus on human sculptures. Our approach proceeds by registering an anatomical model to a statue, identifying the missing parts. Compatible statues are then provided by the users and their poses are changed to match the broken statue, using a point-cloud specific skinning technique. The modified statues provide replacement parts which are blended in the original statue.