Automatic 3D object fracturing for evaluation of partial retrieval and object restoration tasks - Benchmark and application to 3D cultural heritage data

Recently, 3D digitization and printing hardware have seen rapidly increasing adoption. High-quality digitization of real-world objects is becoming more and more efficient. In this context, growing amounts of data from the cultural heritage (CH) domain such as columns, tombstones or arches are being digitized and archived in 3D repositories. In many cases, these objects are not complete, but fragmented into several pieces and eroded over time. As manual restoration of fragmented objects is a tedious and error-prone process, recent work has addressed automatic reassembly and completion of fragmented 3D data sets. While a growing number of related techniques are being proposed by researchers, their evaluation currently is limited to smaller numbers of high-quality test fragment sets. We address this gap by contributing a methodology to automatically generate 3D fragment data based on synthetic fracturing of 3D input objects. Our methodology allows generating large-scale fragment test data sets from existing CH object models, complementing manual benchmark generation based on scanning of fragmented real objects. Besides being scalable, our approach also has the advantage to come with ground truth information (i.e. the input objects), which is often not available when scans of real fragments are used. We apply our approach to the Hampson collection of digitized pottery objects, creating and making available a first, larger restoration test data set that comes with ground truth. Furthermore, we illustrate the usefulness of our test data for evaluation of a recent 3D restoration method based on symmetry analysis and also outline how the applicability of 3D retrieval techniques could be evaluated with respect to 3D restoration tasks. Finally, we discuss first results of an ongoing extension of our methodology to include object erosion processes by means of a physiochemical model simulating weathering effects.