Computer simulation of archaeological drawings

Abstract

Abstract Archaeologists usually produce archaeological drawings through complicated steps including painting with hands, scanning and redrawing, etc. We aim at simplifying the process of traditional archaeological drawings by automatically generating line drawings, helping archaeologists produce ideal archaeological drawings flexibly and conveniently. However, traditional methods for generating line drawings cannot be directly used for archaeological drawings because of special purposes in drawings. So, we take into account the characteristics of archaeological drawings and put forward an effective method for generating line drawings especially for archaeological drawings. In this way, archaeologists can get ideal line drawings by taking photos of implements, processing them with this method automatically and modifying line drawings flexibly. Specifically, we first smooth the input pictures, based on which we extract lines that meet the rules of archaeological drawings by edge tracking. Then we determine the location of central axis and generate curves of lines to get line drawings. Finally, we integrate the above techniques and build an archaeological drawing system with friendly interface. Various experimental results and evaluations verify that our method and the archaeological drawings system are effective.