Benedict Brown will present his preFPO on Monday October 1 at 2PM. Room will be announced later. The members of his committee are; Szymon Rusinkiewicz, advisor; David Dobkin and Tom Funkhouser, readers; Adam Finkelstein and Ken Steiglitz, nonreaders. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. --------------------------------- Title: Registration and Matching of Large Geometric Datasets for Cultural Heritage Applications Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in acquiring high resolution digital representations of cultural heritage. This includes not only high resolution photographs, but also detailed 3-D models of statues, buildings, paintings, archeological objects, etc. These applications raise a number of challenges in data management, and in designing affordable acquisition systems which are practical, efficient, and usable. This thesis looks at how to handle alignment applications in this framework. We show how to align range scans in the presence of calibration error, as is the case in large, high-resolution models such as the Digital Michelangelo models. At the other extreme, we show how to align small fresco pieces from the Thera project completely automatically; in this case each individual model is small, but because there are tens of thousands of fragments, efficiency and automation are paramount. We also show how registration techniques extend to the problem of matching these fragments to each other. Finally, we look at the problem of aligning high-quality 2-D images of these fragments to the 3-D models.