Solving archaeological puzzles

This paper focuses on the re-assembly of an archaeological artifact, given images of its fragments. This problem can be considered as a special challenging case of puzzle solving. The restricted case of re-assembly of a natural image from square pieces has been investigated extensively and was shown to be a difficult problem in its own right. Likewise, the case of matching clean 2D polygons/splines based solely on their geometric properties has been studied. But what if these ideal conditions do not hold? This is the problem addressed in the paper. Three unique characteristics of archaeological fragments make puz-zle solving extremely difficult: (1) The fragments are of general shape; (2) They are abraded, especially at the boundaries (where the strongest cues for matching should exist); and (3) The domain of valid trans-formations between the pieces is continuous. The key contribution of this paper is a fully-automatic and general algorithm that addresses puzzle solving in this intriguing domain. We show that our approach manages to correctly reassemble dozens of broken artifacts and frescoes. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper focuses on the challenging problem of re-assembling archaeological artifacts given their general shape, abrasion, and continuous valid transformations between pieces. The key contribution is a fully-automatic and general algorithm that successfully reassembles dozens of broken artifacts and frescoes.