4D Reconstruction of Tangible Cultural Heritage Objects from Web-Retrieved Images

Abstract

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.

Geospatial platforms and immersive tools for social cohesion: the 4D narrative of architecture of Australia’s Afghan cameleers

“…Based on the premise that architecture is a unique and revealing frame of inquiry to gain insight into human values, worldview and material culture, this paper aims to address one major issue of current concern. This is to engage the unique method of 4D (four-dimensional) capturing (with the integration of HBIM (Historic Building Information Modelling (Banfi, Brumana, & Stanga, 2019;Carnevali, Lanfranchi, & Russo, 2019;Charbonneau, Spiric, Blais, Robichaud, & Burgess, 2018;Cuperschmid, Fabricio, & Franco, 2019;Doulamis, Doulamis, Protopapadakis, Voulodimos, & Ioannides, 2018;Kyriakaki et al, 2014;Nieto, Moyano, & García, 2019;Rodríguez-Gonzálvez et al, 2017)) and digital dissemination tool for historical research) to document, record and disseminate the complete narrative of the traces of built heritage that are currently lost or partially lost and under threat. It is anticipated that this digital platform, together with a VR/AR application would play a significant role to disseminate knowledge regarding the early Muslims in Australia and their contribution to the Australian society, and minimise the distance between the Muslims and Non-Muslims in Australia through a proper understanding (that has been widely misunderstood for a long time) and mitigate the myth of fear and mistrust regarding Muslim and Islam.…”

Crowdsourcing Lost Cultural Heritage

“…Some recent studies are dealing with the 4D (space-time) virtual reconstruction of Cultural Heritage objects using web-retrieved images (Kyriakaki et al, 2014;Santos et al 2014;). An approach for diachronic virtual reconstruction of lost heritage based on historical information integrated with real metric data of the remains was proposed by Guidi et al, (2011).…”

Transforming Intangible Folkloric Performing Arts into Tangible Choreographic Digital Objects: The Terpsichore Approach

“…Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) content means "the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skillsas well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith". Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is a very important mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development, as underscored in the UNESCO Recommendation on the safeguarding of Traditional Culture and folklore of 1989, in the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity of 2001 and in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Kyriakaki, 2014). Improving the digitization technology regarding capturing, modelling and mathematical representation of performance arts and especially folklore dances is critical in: (i) promoting cultural diversity to the children and the youth through the safeguard of traditional performance arts; (ii) making local communities and especially indigenous people aware of the richness of their intangible heritage; (iii) strengthening cooperation and intercultural dialogue between people, different cultures and countries.…”