Digital data minutiae processing for the analysis of cultural artefacts

摘要

This invention relates to means and processes of analysing cultural artefacts, for example to authenticate works of art or to reconstruct fragmented archaeological artefacts digitally, by first scanning the target artefact to produce a digital data model of the target artefact, which is then transformed algorithmically to obtain a target digital transform. This is analysed to identify and extract digital data minutiae from the digital transform data. Then, a number of comparator artefacts are scanned using the same scanning technologies to produce a digital data model of each comparator artefact. The same processes of algorithmic transformation and digital data minutiae extraction are applied to the comparator digital data models. An algorithmic comparison is then made between the target digital data minutiae and the comparator digital data minutiae to identify correlating comparator and target digital data minutiae in accordance with predetermined correlation criteria and the artefact is characterised according to the degree of correlation, for purposes of authentication or digital reconstruction, for example.