Context-based Surface Pattern Completion of Ancient Pottery

Abstract

Among various ancient cultures it was common practice to adorn pottery artifacts with lavish surface decoration. While the applied painting styles, color schemes and displayed mythological content may vary greatly, the presence of simple patterns which appear in a repetitive manner can be observed across civilizations and periods. Such pattern sequences generally are arranged in a structured manner in ornament bands or columns that extend over the entire surface of the object. Due to the poor conservation state of many cultural heritage objects, parts of the surface are oftentimes badly damaged or missing altogether. Yet, if the majority of a pattern sequence is preserved, this information can be leveraged to approximate its missing parts. We present an approach that allows the fully automatic determination of the generation rule inherent to a repetitive surface pattern. Based on this generation rule and the preserved patterns from the same pattern class we propose a workflow for reconstruct missing or damaged parts of the surface painting. We evaluate our approach by applying it to a selection of pottery from ancient Peruvian and Greek cultures, showing that our automatic approach is able to handle a variety of problem cases.