Motif-driven Retrieval of Greek Painted Pottery

The analysis of painted pottery is instrumental for understanding ancient Greek society and human behavior of past cultures in Archaeology. A key part of this analysis is the discovery of cross references to establish links and correspondences. However, due to the vast amount of documented images and 3D scans of pottery objects in today's domain repositories, manual search is very time consuming. Computer aided retrieval methods are of increasing importance. Mostly, current retrieval systems for this kind of cultural heritage data only allow to search for pottery of similar vessel's shape. However, in many cases important similarity cues are given by motifs painted on these vessels. We present an interactive retrieval system that makes use of this information to allow for a motif-driven search in cultural heritage repositories. We address the problem of unsupervised motif extraction for preprocessing and the shape-based similarity search for Greek painted pottery. Our experimental evaluation on relevant repository data demonstrates effectiveness of our approach on examples of different motifs of interests.