Visual Exploration of Repetitive Patterns on Ancient Peruvian Pottery

The analysis and understanding of artifact properties and their relationships is a key objective in the archaeological analysis of cultural heritage objects. There are many aspects of concern, including both shape properties of the objects as a whole and appearances stemming from paintings and ornamentations on the object surfaces. To date, experts consider those mostly holistically on a per-object basis. We present an approach for the interactive visual exploration and correlation of shape- and ornament-based properties of a large collection of ancient vessels. Our approach allows us to group objects by said properties, and to relate them in side-by-side and bipartite graph displays.
To this end, we define an encompassing set of feature descriptors, which are leveraged to cluster the objects by user-selected properties. Case studies show that a comparative overview of all objects effectively supports the discovery of interesting co-occurrences of shapes and ornaments. This way, our tool opens new possibilities for the domain analysis of cultural heritage object collections by data-driven visual exploration.