Digital Imaging for Cultural Heritage Preservation

The Past and the Future: Archaeology and Computer Science In the last fifty years, the growing use of computer applications has become a main feature of the archaeological research [1]. Since the ’90s, when computer science was oriented to the creation of work tools and solutions for the archive and management of quantitative data, to […]

Experiencing the Past: Computer Graphics in Archaeology (Digital Imaging) Part 2

Propylon The first case study [54,55] is relative to the open area (so called Piazzale Inferiore 10) directly connected to the building of power itself, the Villa, and linked with the facilities of the village, in a period between the seventeenth and fifteenth century BC (Figure 1.2). The excavations of the summer 2006 revealed on […]

Experiencing the Past: Computer Graphics in Archaeology (Digital Imaging) Part 3

Temenos and Room III The sacred area represented by the central part of the acropolis, during the eighth century BC, was partially enclosed by a low and wide precinct wall of eccentric shape, a Temenos, well preserved along the eastern and northern slopes. It was made with stone blocks in double curtain technique (emplecton), with […]

Experiencing the Past: Computer Graphics in Archaeology (Digital Imaging) Part 4

Female Torso The use of laser scanner and data processing of the data has significant applications in the digital restoration of individual archaeological artifacts, also for what concerns the clarification of certain technical or artistic features. A case study of this type was represented by the analysis on a portion of female torso in marble, […]

Using Digital 3D Models for Study and Restoration of Cultural Heritage Artifacts (Digital Imaging) Part 1

Introduction The introduction of new technologies in the context of cultural heritage (CH) and Archeology has often been a difficult issue. This is probably related to the lack in confidence in replacing consolidated approaches with experimental methods heavily based on innovative hardware or software systems. This already happened for a number of revolutionary technologies: for […]

Using Digital 3D Models for Study and Restoration of Cultural Heritage Artifacts (Digital Imaging) Part 2

Art Catalogs and Digital Repositories CH cataloguing efforts are still based on just textual data enriched by (a few, often B/W) photographs. It is very easy to forecast a future where catalogs will adopt digital 3D models as the main representation resource for characterizing the shape and the appearance of the artifacts. Unfortunately, whether this […]

Using Digital 3D Models for Study and Restoration of Cultural Heritage Artifacts (Digital Imaging) Part 3

Classifying and Archiving Carved Faces: The Bayon Digital Archival Project The Bayon digital archival project [25] is a very complex acquisition experience, which used several technologies [26] to acquire the extremely big (100 m length on each side by 43 m height at the most) architecture of the Bayon temple in Cambodia. FIGURE 2.14 An […]

Using Digital 3D Models for Study and Restoration of Cultural Heritage Artifacts (Digital Imaging) Part 4

Tools for Investigation and Diagnostics As stated before, specific scientific investigations can be conducted directly on the digital 3D model. In the David restoration project (2003-2004) [43], the authors performed two main “digital” investigations: the characterization of the surface exposure with respect to the fall of contaminants, and the computation of a number of physical […]

Processing Sampled 3D Data: Reconstruction and Visualization Technologies (Digital Imaging) Part 1

Introduction This topic describes the so-called 3D scanning pipeline (i.e., how raw sampled 3D data have to be processed to obtain a complete 3D model of a real-world object). This kind of raw data may be the result of the sampling of a real-world object by a 3D scanning device [1] or by one of […]

Processing Sampled 3D Data: Reconstruction and Visualization Technologies (Digital Imaging) Part 2

Merging Reconstruction/merging from point samples or range maps has been one of the more active fields on scanning-related research in the last few years. A very important feature of a reconstruction code is to perform a weighted integration of the range maps (or point set) and not just joining them. Since we usually have a […]