Cross-Modal Search and Exploration of Greek Painted Pottery (original) (raw)

Qp: A tool for generating 3D models of ancient Greek pottery

Journal of Cultural Heritage, 2009

The development of content based retrieval mechanisms is a very active research area. Present studies are mainly focused on automating the information extraction and indexing processes. Usually for the development and evaluation of such mechanisms there is always a need for a ground-truth database. In this paper we present a software tool named qp that is able to semi-automatically produce a collection of random 3D vessels, with morphological characteristics similar to those found in ancient Greek pottery, a ceramic group exhibited worldwide with great impact to scholars as well as general public. A 3D vessel collection has been produced by qp and can be used as a test bed dataset for the development of shape-based 3D descriptors applicable to pottery. Additionally, qp can be considered as a 3D vessel modelling software tool which can be used by people not related to computer graphics technology and particularly to 3D modelling.

“From a Buried Fragment to the Virtual Artefact: A Case Study of Greek Pottery”

The fragmentary condition of objects is often an issue in the study of material cultural heritage. In archaeology, and in pottery studies in particular, the fragmentary condition of excavated objects impacts on research into their history and presentation. Ceramic vessels and vase fragments are the most numerous archaeological findings and a primary source of information about various aspects of ancient life: private, public, religious, economic and technological, social and artistic. The subject of this chapter is a fragmentary clay drinking cup, kantharos, a vessel attributed to the god Dionysus and a typical drinking vase used at symposia (gatherings). This particular kantharos was unearthed during the excavations at the ancient settlement of Therme, today’s Karabournaki near Thessaloniki, Greece. The vase dates to the Archaic period between the seventh and the sixth century BC. Although the kantharos is preserved to a large extent, its fragmentary condition challenges complete reconstruction. Evidence for reliable reconstruction is insufficient: the lower part that would originally have consisted of a base and foot, is missing. The process of virtual reconstruction through 3D visualization, described in this chapter, has contributed significantly to the study and presentation of the vase. The authors consider the advantages and limitations of technologies used. The process of creating this particular computer model may be applied to other fragmentary vases that come either from the excavation at Karabournaki or any other archaeological site or collection. This research may be of interest to experts in 3D technologies, as well as archaeologists and art historians, both academic scholars and students, museum curators and conservators, educators and other multidisciplinary audiences.

Semi-automated Annotation of Repetitive Ornaments on 3D Painted Pottery Surfaces

2020

The creation of drawings from the surface of painted pottery artifacts is an important practice in archaeological research and documentation. Traditional approaches include manual drawings using pen and paper, either directly on the physical surface, or from photographs, while more recent approaches are supported by photography or flattening of 3D digitized objects. Elaborate vase paintings, mostly showing figural scenes, often comprise ornamental decorations in secondary position or in the background, exhibiting repetitive patterns. We propose a tool supporting the creation of archaeological drawings with a semi-automatic extraction of ornamental surface sections, based on a combination of user-defined queries and self-similarity detection. Appropriate heuristics allow to detect the presence and positions of ornamental bands, a frequently occurring scheme, where ornamental primitives are evenly spaced along the tangential direction of a vessel's solid of revolution. Our interactive tool allows domain experts to efficiently select ornamental queries, and assess the quality of resulting similarity detections. First experiments with real world artifacts from ancient Greek and Peruvian cultures confirm the feasibility of the approach. CCS Concepts • Human-centered computing → Visualization systems and tools; • Information systems → Specialized information retrieval; • Computing methodologies → Image processing; • Applied computing → Arts and humanities;

Detecting Shape Similarities in 3D Pottery Repositories

IEEE Internet Computing, 2010

Shape matching is one of the main research procedures performed by archaeologists. Real time 3D computer graphics, 3D digitisation and content based retrieval are technologies that can facilitate the automation of the shape matching process. As pottery plays a significant role in understanding ancient societies, we focus on the development of compact shape descriptors that can be used for content based retrieval of complete or nearly complete 3D pottery replicas. In this work, we present shape descriptors that exploit the axial symmetry feature and attempt to enhance the archaeological study of pottery by using 3D graphics technologies. We evaluated the performance of the descriptors using a 3D pottery ground truth repository as a test bed. We created an experimental 3D pottery search engine and attempted to integrate a content based retrieval mechanism in a 3D virtual reality environment.

Chapter 2. From a Buried Fragment to the Virtual Artefact: A Case Study of Greek Pottery

Digital Techniques for Documenting and Preserving Cultural Heritage

The fragmentary condition of objects is often an issue in the study of material cultural heritage. In archaeology, and in pottery studies in particular, the fragmentary condition of excavated objects impacts on research into their history and presentation. Ceramic vessels and vase fragments are the most numerous archaeological findings and a primary source of information about various aspects of ancient life: private, public, religious, economic and technological, social and artistic. The subject of this chapter is a fragmentary clay drinking cup, kantharos, a vessel attributed to the god Dionysus and a typical drinking vase used at symposia (gatherings). This particular kantharos was unearthed during the excavations at the ancient settlement of Therme, today's Karabournaki near Thessaloniki, Greece. The vase dates to the Archaic period between the seventh and the sixth century BC. Although the kantharos is preserved to a large extent, its fragmentary condition challenges complete reconstruction. Evidence for reliable reconstruction is insufficient: the lower part that would originally have consisted of a base and foot, is missing. The process of virtual reconstruction through 3D visualization, described in this chapter, has contributed significantly to the study and presentation of the vase. The authors consider the advantages and limitations of technologies used. The process of creating this particular computer model may be applied to other fragmentary vases that come either from the excavation at Karabournaki or any other archaeological site or collection. This research may be of interest to experts in 3D technologies, as well as archaeologists and art historians, both academic scholars and students, museum curators and conservators, educators and other multidisciplinary audiences.

3D pottery shape matching using depth map images

Journal of Cultural Heritage, 2011

The utilisation of 3D computer graphics technologies in the domain of pottery analysis can enhance archaeological research in terms of data management, indexing and shape matching. In this paper, we attempt to reduce the dimensions of the 3D vessel shape matching problem in order to create Web-enabled compact shape descriptors applicable for content based retrieval systems. This is achieved by exploiting significant morphological features of vessels such as the rotational symmetry and the opposed positioning of appendages. We propose the idea of capturing the surface relief of a normalised, in terms of scale, position and orientation 3D vessel on a pair of depthmap images. We question the ability of performing shape matching of complete or nearly complete 3D vessels by encoding depthmap images using 2D shape descriptors. We have evaluated the performance of two shape descriptors applied on depthmap images in relation to a generic 3D shape descriptor. For the performance evaluation, we have implemented multiple queries-by-example on five ancient Greek vessel shape categories found in our calibrated 3D vessel database.

New ways in digitization and visualization of cultural objects

2002

Recent developments in 2D and 3D digitization and visualization technologies, as well as in measurement instrumentation, combined with the emerging multimedia databases and network technologies offer today new possibilities for the integrated and complete description of cultural objects. Our Institute, with main interest in the preservation of Cultural Heritage, in an attempt to exploit these new technologies, is developing multimedia databases for cultural objects that include 3D geometric and physicochemical data and are able to be delivered through the Internet. The "Ark of Refugee Heirloom" [1][26] (recording and documentation of unknown heirlooms in the five prefectures of Eastern Macedonia and Thrace that belong to refugees whose origins lay in regions of the Ottoman Empire, south Russia, Bulgaria and others surrounding the Black Sea), is a first generation 3D-database, where, selectively, we have included 3D objects in parallel with their 2D images. "3D-ArCAD" [2][3] (database for archaeological ceramic and glass artifacts with 2D and 3D images, description, typological characteristics, historical information and point-wise surface data), is a second generation 3D-database, where in addition to 2D and 3D images, typological characteristics and historical information, we also include point-wise surface data.

A 3D Pottery Database for Benchmarking Content Based Retrieval Mechanisms

2008

The benchmarking of 3D content base retrieval mechanisms is usually performed on test bed datasets composed by 3D models. These usually cover several categories of objects such as ships, airplanes, animals, furniture, etc. In this paper, we attempted the generation of a ground truth database of 3D models that exhibit morphological characteristics similar to those found in ancient Greek pottery. We developed a software tool to model 3D vessels based on bitmap profile images, enhanced with the function to semi-automatically generate random 3D vessels accompanied by metadata. The metadata follow a proposed MPEG-7 compatible schema which covers the basic information required by an archaeologist to describe a vessel and the MPEG-7 3D Shape Spectrum Descriptor for allowing possible performance comparisons of novel descriptors against a standard.

3 D Models for Cultural Heritage: Beyond Plain Visualization

2011

Digital 3D models would let scholars study artwork on a much wider scale than in real life, since they could have virtual access to objects located far away, without the limitations of museum operating hours or access rights. A crucial requirement for using digital models as replacements for printed material is the availability of the following:• enhanced searching over digital libraries;• interactive visual analysis without compromising model accuracy and quality;• flexible tools for shape comparisons; and• improved shape reasoning capabilities.

Digital modes of interpretation of Pictish sculpture

Education and Information Technologies

Cultural heritage is no longer something that can only be experienced in a museum exhibition. Digital tools have facilitated the distribution of material relating to artefacts, both in its representation and in presenting its context. This paper describes how digital modelling techniques can be synthesised with 3D scanning to digitally restore artefacts and create authentic replicas of their original states. The digital artefacts can then be used to assist the process of interpreting these artefacts in diverse forms, both in the museum and outside the museum. The study looks at Pictish sculpture as a case-study, restoring 3D models of two stones, and creating varying opportunities for their interpretation. As part of this study, new interactive tools, a virtual reality environment, and a virtual tour are built to assist immersive interpretation of the Pictish sculpture. The application of these digitised objects serves as an opportunity for informal learning. These applications were...