Abstract
We present an algorithm for vectorizing measured drawings of archaeological remains. Since archaeological excavation is essentially a destructive process, measured drawings are one of the most important records. Most of these drawings are first hand-drawn at excavation sites and then archaeologists spend an enormous amount of time clicking several points to convert scanned drawings into digital vector formats. Our raster-vector conversion algorithm will make this process more convenient. The algorithm assumes that a measured drawing has three layers: first, periodical sectional patterns on a sheet of paper; second, connected components of measured archaeological objects, and third, annotations with long lines. Vectorization experiments were done with scanned measured drawings of the archaeological remains at Tel Rekhesh, Israel. The resultant drawings demonstrate that our algorithm can significantly reduce the following process of manual clicking and editing. Future work will include the implementation of a web service to convert raster images into vector drawings and the improvement of the proposed algorithm by using more of these drawings.
