The following video is a quick animation showing a graphical depiction of 10 pottery fragments coming together to reconstruct a pot. The animation was generated from custom-designed software that takes as input 3D (x,y,z) measurements of the outer surfaces of a set of broken pottery fragments and outputs the "most likely" pots from which the fragments were generated.
The next video is similar to that above yet may be broken into three parts which provide additional information on how the solution was computed.
Part I
This part of the video is similar to that above. Initially only the fragments are shown (as differen colors).
Part II
This part of the video shows the matched axes for each fragment. The axes are local estimates of the true pot central axis which, if the pot was made on a potter's wheel, is shared by all of the fragments. For our computer model, this is equivalent to assuming the pot surface is well-represented mathematically as a surface of revolution (handles / spouts etc. violate this assumption). Each axis estimate appear as cylinder and the axis has a color and position appropriate to the fragment from which the estimate was obtained. For example, a blue fragment will have a blue axis having a position and orientation in the vicinity of that fragment in the position and orientation of the estimated associated pot axis.
Part III
This part of the video shows the local boundaries where each fragment pair was "STITCHED" together. Matched boundaries include 3D positions along each fragment boundary and the associated normal, i.e., surface orientation at each of the matched points. The normals allow us to join the fragment boundaries such that the outer surface connects together smoothly along the matched boundary. The points are shown as very small spheres and the normals at each point appear as very small cylinders emanating out of each sphere. The spheres and cylinders share the color of the fragment from which they orignated.