A contour matching algorithm to reconstruct ruptured documents

A procedure for reassembling ruptured documents from a large number of fragments is proposed. Such problems often arises in forensic and archiving. Usually, fragments are mixed and take arbitrary shapes. The proposed procedure concentrates on contour information of the fragments and represents it as feature strings to perform a matching based on dynamic programming. Experiments with 500 images of randomly shredded fragments show that the proposed reconstruction procedure is able to compose nearly 98% of the ruptured pages.