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The number of digital images that are available online today has reached unprecedented levels. Recent statistics showed that by the end of 2013 there were over 250 billion photographs stored in just one of the major social media sites, with a daily average upload of 300 million photos. These photos, apart from documenting personal lives, often relate to experiences in well-known places of cultural interest, throughout several periods of time. Thus from the viewpoint of Cultural Heritage professionals, they constitute valuable and freely available digital cultural content. Advances in the fields of Photogrammetry and Computer Vision have led to significant breakthroughs such as the Structure from Motion algorithm which creates 3D models of objects using their 2D photographs. The existence of powerful and affordable computational machinery enables the reconstruction not only of single structures such as artefacts, but also of entire cities. This paper presents an overview of our methodology for producing cost-effective 4D – i.e. in space and time – models of Cultural Heritage structures such as monuments and artefacts from 2D data (pictures, video) and semantic information, freely available ‘in the wild’, i.e. in Internet repositories and social media. State-of-the-art methods from Computer Vision, Photogrammetry, 3D Reconstruction and Semantic representation are incorporated in an innovative workflow with the main goal to enable historians, architects, archaeologists, urban planners and other cultural heritage professionals to reconstruct cost-effective views of historical structures out of the billions of free images floating around the web and subsequently interact with those reconstructions.

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ABSTRACT:Outdoor large-scale cultural sites are mostly sensitive to environmental, natural and human made factors, implying an imminent need for a spatio-temporal assessment to identify regions of potential cultural interest (material degradation, structuring, conservation). On the other hand, in Cultural Heritage research quite different actors are involved (archaeologists, curators, conservators, simple users) each of diverse needs. All these statements advocate that a 5D modelling (3D geometry plus time plus levels of details) is ideally required for preservation and assessment of outdoor large scale cultural sites, which is currently implemented as a simple aggregation of 3D digital models at different time and levels of details. The main bottleneck of such an approach is its complexity, making 5D modelling impossible to be validated in real life conditions. In this paper, a cost effective and affordable framework for 5D modelling is proposed based on a spatial-temporal dependent aggregation of 3D digital models, by incorporating a predictive assessment procedure to indicate which regions (surfaces) of an object should be reconstructed at higher levels of details at next time instances and which at lower ones. In this way, dynamic change history maps are created, indicating spatial probabilities of regions needed further 3D modelling at forthcoming instances. Using these maps, predictive assessment can be made, that is, to localize surfaces within the objects where a high accuracy reconstruction process needs to be activated at the forthcoming time instances. The proposed 5D Digital Cultural Heritage Model (5D-DCHM) is implemented using open interoperable standards based on the CityGML framework, which also allows the description of additional semantic metadata information. Visualization aspects are also supported to allow easy manipulation, interaction and representation of the 5D-DCHM geometry and the respective semantic information. The open source 3DCityDB incorporating a PostgreSQL geo-database is used to manage and manipulate 3D data and their semantics.

ABSTRACT:The advent of technology in digital cameras and their incorporation into virtually any smart mobile device has led to an explosion of the number of photographs taken every day. Today, the number of images stored online and available freely has reached unprecedented levels. It is estimated that in 2011, there were over 100 billion photographs stored in just one of the major social media sites. This number is growing exponentially. Moreover, advances in the fields of Photogrammetry and Computer Vision have led to significant breakthroughs such as the Structure from Motion algorithm which creates 3D models of objects using their twodimensional photographs. The existence of powerful and affordable computational machinery not only the reconstruction of complex structures but also entire cities. This paper illustrates an overview of our methodology for producing 3D models of Cultural Heritage structures such as monuments and artefacts from 2D data (pictures, video), available on Internet repositories, social media, Google Maps, Bing, etc. We also present new approaches to semantic enrichment of the end results and their subsequent export to Europeana, the European digital library, for integrated, interactive 3D visualisation within regular web browsers using WebGl and X3D. Our main goal is to enable historians, architects, archaeologists, urban planners and affiliated professionals to reconstruct views of historical structures from millions of images floating around the web and interact with them.

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HBIM (Heritage Building Information Modelling) can be nowadays considered as part of the digitization process of Cultural Heritage, with the particular characteristics that being born to manage Models and Data within a unique environment they can be inherited to adopt a synergic approach to the cultural Heritage 'as a whole system'. To this aim they need to overcome gaps and barriers undertaking an holistic approach in many directions. The paper intends to introduce an overview on the meaning of Holistic Heritage Information Building. The attribute holistic is here used with the meaning to empower instruments and methods capable to interconnect single HBIM nodes within networks where to find the information collected in a cross sectorial space: vocabularies, libraries of object and semantics, derived from such 'Informative Models' -with the support of Virtual Hub technologies -can boost nodes-networking empowering the capabilities of BIM Informative Modelling together with web accessible Geographic Informative System. Such richness once interconnected can be accessed from space-temporal queries, semantic searches, and harvested with other networks in order to enhance the cross correlation of the information and allowing the sharing of different case studies and HBIM within a space-temporal framework. This will allow the comparison of masonry texture, history of material finishing and skilled workers across space and time. HHBIM HUBS will be a gate toward the eXtended Reality potentials attracting and distributing data coming from different sources.