Visual Exploration of Repetitive Patterns on Ancient Peruvian Pottery.

The analysis and understanding of artefact properties and their relationships is a key goal in archaeological analysis of cultural heritage objects. There are many aspects of concern, including shape properties of the objects, but also appearance properties stemming from paintings and ornamentations on the object surfaces. To date, these are considered by experts mostly holistically and 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 to group objects by 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 properties, selected by the user. Case studies show that a comparative overview of all objects effectively supports the discovery of interesting co-occurrences of shape and ornament properties. This way, our tool opens new possibilities for the domain analysis of cultural heritage object collections by data-driven visual exploration.