  In this paper we target the problem of the retrieval of colour patterns over
surfaces. We generalize to surface tessellations the well known Local Binary
Pattern (LBP) descriptor for images. The key concept of the LBP is to code the
variability of the colour values around each pixel. In the case of a surface
tessellation we adopt rings around vertices that are obtained with a
sphere-mesh intersection driven by the edges of the mesh; for this reason, we
name our method edgeLBP. Experimental results are provided to show how this
description performs well for pattern retrieval, also when patterns come from
degraded and corrupted archaeological fragments.
