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

Abstract

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.Keywords: Hermite Cubic Splines/2D curve approximation/ancient Greek pottery/ VRML/XML/MPEG-7/OpenGL/3D extrusion/3D revolve/point cloud triangulation

Mapping site-level microtopography with Real- Time Kinematic Global Navigation Satellite Systems (RTK GNSS) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photogrammetry (UAVP)

“…Archaeological applications of microtopographic mapping have recently focused on characterizing threedimensional (hereafter, '3D') surfaces or volumes, highlighting not only the interpretive potential of the method, but also its preservation of archaeological heritage for posterity, even if only in a virtual medium [27-30;15]. At the individual artifact and ecofact scale, such 3D modeling of archaeological heritage, whether for archival and/or analytical purposes, has been applied to individual stone, ceramic, and faunal items [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41], and even to ancient footprints [42]. The 3D volumes and surface characteristics of monumental architecture, caves, and freestanding or rupestral sculpture have been captured similarly [43; 27-28; 44-57].…”

Content-based navigation within virtual museums

“…Once an exhibit is selected as a query object, the client submits a query to the server using the exhibit's ID. The query server performs shape matching by computing the morphological similarity between the query object and the objects in the database [34]. Once the similarity ranking scores are computed, they are returned sorted to the client.…”

“…The database includes metadata contain information related to basic cultural information (shape, type of shape, attribution, workshop, preservation state, etc.) [34], the 3D shape descriptor used for shape matching (our previously published 3D shape matching descriptor [2] and a set of predefined 3D coordinates, which are used to position the exhibits within the virtual museum. The query server is responsible for populating the virtual museum in the client side with the artifacts and their metadata.…”

Detecting Shape Similarities in 3D Pottery Repositories

“…On the other hand, the computer graphics side provides information about the 3D digitisation technique that has been used and the availability of texture map information [5]. The metadata have been organised in a native-XML database using a custom MPEG-7 compatible schema [6].…”

“…We have gathered a total of 1012 3D pottery models. 94 vessels were digitised using the shape from silhouette and laser triangulation methods, 718 vessels were manually modelled by different research groups and 200 were dynamically generated using the "qp" software tool [6]. The repository covers several shape categories such as ancient Greek (Alabastron, Amphora, Hydria, Kantharos, Lekythos, Psykter, etc), Native American (Jar, Effigy, Bowl, Bottle, etc) and modern pottery.…”