Using Mathematical Morphology to Simplify Archaeological Fracture Surfaces

Abstract

It is computationally expensive to fit the high-resolution 3D meshes of abraded fragments of archaeological artefacts in a collection. Therefore, simplification of fracture surfaces while preserving the fitting essentials is required to guide and structure the whole reassembly process. Features of the scale spaces from Mathematical Morphology (MM) permit a hierarchical approach to this simplification, in a contact-preserving manner, while being insensitive to missing geometry. We propose a new method to focusing MM on the fracture surfaces only, by an embedding that uses morphological duality to compute the desired opening by a closing. The morphological scale space operations on the proposed dual embedding of archaeological fracture surfaces are computed in a distance transform treatment of voxelized meshes.