Dergi makalesi Açık Erişim

Graphical documentation of antic relief surfaces

2016    Karkinli, Ahmet Emin; Civicioglu, Pinar; Besdok, Erkan; Kesikoglu, Abdusselam; Coruh, Levent; Tercan, Emre

Hittites were the people who are most likely of Northern Caucasus origin, who lived in Anatolia in the ancient ages. Hittites go by the name Heth and Hittim in the Bible. Hittites have spread from the North Caucasus to Anatolia and to Middle East in the early 2000 B.C. The Kingdom of the Hittites has maintained its presence in Anatolia until 2300-1200 B.C., and the Hittites principalities have maintained their presence in various cities in the Middle East until 700 B.C. Although many commercial centers were present, their central government was named Hattushash, which was located in Bogazkoy-corum. The significant Hittite settlements were Hattushash, Quadesh, Ankuwa, Kanesh, Harran and Aleppo. Various items, artworks, cuneiforms and reliefs that were left from ancient civilizations are very important sources of information for studying ancient cultures of Middle Eastern origin. Many ancient reliefs that are thousands of years old lose their scientific and artistic values due to the damage they suffer because of natural or artificial causes. For the purpose of studying, preserving or repairing ancient reliefs, the graphical documentations of the mentioned reliefs can be used. The complex surface structure in the ancient reliefs surfaces, caused by the damages that are sustained over time, makes it difficult to perform graphical documentation; therefore, separate researchers may obtain graphical documentations of different spatial accuracies for the same artifact. In this paper, a dense image matching and spline curves based method is proposed, which can be used for the graphical documentation of complex surfaced reliefs. In the experiments that were conducted, the method that was proposed for two separate Hittites reliefs graphical documentation and the results obtained by separate researchers have been compared graphically. The graphical and numerical results that were obtained indicate that the proposed method can be used for graphical documentation of complex surfaced reliefs. (C) 2016 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.