3D artifacts similarity based on the concurrent evaluation of heterogeneous properties

Archaeological artifacts are often classified in homogeneous groups, according to either intangible properties (e.g., origin, use, age) or physical features (e.g., color, material, geometric shape, size, style). In particular, a single property is usually not enough to characterize artifacts' peculiar traits, as most of the objects are affected by degradation or only partially preserved. In this article, we propose a shape analysis and comparison pipeline specifically targeted to the similarity assessment of real-world 3D artifacts. The proposed methodology is able to concurrently evaluate heterogeneous properties, such as geometric (e.g., curvature, size, roundness, or mass distribution) and photometric (e.g., texture, color distribution, or reflectance) aspects. The geometric description is based on a statistical technique to select properties that are mutually independent; the photometric information is handled according to a topological perspective and complemented by the analysis of color distribution. The outcome is a mixed description of each 3D artifact, which is used to derive a similarity measure between objects. The potential of our approach is high because any property representable as real- or vector- valued functions can be easily added in our framework. Experimental results carried on an existing collection of textured triangle meshes are exhibited to show the potentiality of the method in retrieval and classification tasks.