The objective and repeatable measurement of the color of artifacts is a much needed practice in archeological research. Indeed, in many cases, color information are crucial for the interpretation of cultural products. To avoid the risks of a too subjective autoptic recognition, Munsell system is commonly adopted. This method requires that a human operator matches the perceived color to its standardized version in Munsell Charts. This approach has significant limitations that can mislead archaeologists in their daily work. The alternative would be the use of accurately calibrated sensors in a controlled illumination environment. These commodities are rarely available for most of the “on field” studies. In this paper a simple, economical, based on consumer level electronics and sensors, semi-automatic method of color detection on accurately and precisely selected regions of digital images of ancient pottery is presented. The proposed method indeed uses only the data from a common CCD sensor supported by a simple color measurement pipeline. Our tool is aimed to prevent subjective errors during color identification and to speed up the process of identification itself. The results obtained and percentages of successful matching with human Munsell color identification have statistically shown that our proposal is an interesting starting point to develop a full, cheap, easy to use system that could facilitate some aspects of the archaeologist’s work.

Date Published: 4 February 2013
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8660, Digital Photography IX, 86600S (4 February 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2007280

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8660:
Digital Photography IX
Nitin Sampat; Sebastiano Battiato, Editor(s)