  Study of cultural-heritage objects with embellished realistic and abstract
designs made up of connected and intertwined curves crosscuts a number of
related disciplines, including archaeology, art history, and heritage
management. However, many objects, such as pottery sherds found in the
archaeological record, are fragmentary, making the underlying complete designs
unknowable at the scale of the sherd fragment. The challenge to reconstruct and
study complete designs is stymied because 1) most fragmentary cultural-heritage
objects contain only a small portion of the underlying full design, 2) in the
case of a stamping application, the same design may be applied multiple times
with spatial overlap on one object, and 3) curve patterns detected on an object
are usually incomplete and noisy. As a result, classical curve-pattern matching
algorithms, such as Chamfer matching, may perform poorly in identifying the
underlying design. In this paper, we develop a new partial-to-global curve
matching algorithm to address these challenges and better identify the full
design from a fragmented cultural heritage object. Specifically, we develop the
algorithm to identify the designs of the carved wooden paddles of the
Southeastern Woodlands from unearthed pottery sherds. A set of pottery sherds
from the Snow Collection, curated at Georgia Southern University, are used to
test the proposed algorithm, with promising results.
