Abstract: Identifying culture relic fragments which shapes are severely damaged has low accuracy by
use of the traditional classification method based on shape features of culture relic fragments. There
are some regular salient geometric features on the surface of culture relics which is embossed or
marked, and extracting such structures can descript shape features of damaged culture relics better. A
classification method of culture relic fragments is presented based on salient geometric features. Frist,
the definition of salient geometric feature is proposed, and the local surface description is given.
Secondly, salient geometric features on the surface of Terra-Cotta Warriors fragments are extracted by
clustering local surface descriptions. At last, salient geometric features are matched using EMD
method, and the classification is identified. The experiment results indicate this method has high
accuracy for the classification of Terra-Cotta Warriors fragments.

Key words: local surface description, salient geometric feature, EMD, Terra-Cotta Warrior