Qp: A tool for generating 3D models of ancient Greek pottery

The development of content based retrieval mechanisms is a very active research area. Present studies are mainly focused on automating the information extraction and indexing processes. Usually for the development and evaluation of such mechanisms, there is always a need for a ground-truth database. In this paper, we present a software tool named qp that is able to semi-automatically produce a collection of random 3D vessels, with morphological characteristics similar to those found in ancient Greek pottery, a ceramic group exhibited worldwide with great impact to scholars as well as general public. A 3D vessel collection has been produced by qp and can be used as a test bed dataset for the development of shape-based 3D descriptors applicable to pottery. Additionally, qp can be considered as a 3D vessel modelling software tool which can be used by people not related to computer graphics technology and particularly to 3D modelling.