Estimating the central axis of a ceramic vessel given 3D Measurements of a vessel fragment

 This video blog demonstrates a new technique we have developed to estimate the central axis of an axially symmetric vessel given 3D measurements from the surface of one of the vessel fragments. The approach uses a 3D surface segmentation technique to decompose the measured fragment surface into a collection of quadric surface patches. A 3D algebraic surface is fit to each of these surface patches and the coefficients of these algebraic curves are then used to provide a noisy estimate of the central axis for each of the quadric surface patches. The axis estimates are then merged into a global estimate of the pot axis using a weighted average that weights estimates based on the number of surface measurements that gave rise to the axis estimate and their goodness-of-fit to the associated quadric surface. A video blog showing the steps of the technique may be viewed at the link below.