Handling Critical Aspects in Massive Photogrammetric Digitization of Museum Assets

Abstract

Abstract. In recent years, a growing interest in the 3D digitisation of museum assets has been pushed by the evident advantages of digital copies in supporting and advancing the knowledge, preservation and promotion of historical artefacts. Realising photo-realistic and precise digital twins of medium and small-sized movable objects implies several operations, still hiring open research problems and hampering the complete automation and derivation of satisfactory results while limiting processing time. The work examines some recurrent issues and potential solutions, summing up several experiences of photogrammetric-based massive digitisation projects. In particular, the article presents some insights into three crucial aspects of the photogrammetric pipeline. The first experiments tackle the Depth of Field (DoF) problem, especially when digitising small artefacts with macro-lenses. On the processing side, two decisive and time-consuming tasks are instead investigated: background masking and point cloud editing, exploring and proposing automatic solutions for speeding up the reconstruction process.

The Use of Virtual Reflectance Transformation Imaging (V-RTI) in the Field of Cultural Heritage: Approaching the Materiality of an Ancient Egyptian Rock-Cut Chapel

“…Various techniques are available for generating RTI, such as using a fixed dome [21] or motorized rotating arcs for light positioning, as well as the adoption of photogrammetry; while extensively applied in the large-scale digitization of museum artifacts [33], the latter is also useful for metrology validation [34,35] and multiband analysis [4].…”

Novel Paradigms in the Cultural Heritage Digitization with Self and Custom-Built Equipment

“…Some research groups have found, analyzed, and measured the quality of the new instruments in certain uses. E.g., in 3D data capture of artifacts of all shapes and kinds, the 3Dom group at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento (Italy) conducted an excellent work [5][6][7][8][9]. However, these analyses were essentially in the context of the evaluation of the performance of the single instrument, and not in the study and verification of its ability to fit into a well-determined pipeline or to allow new workflows and uses.…”

Análisis de dos técnicas para la digitalización de colecciones históricas de modelos anatómicos

“…Un aumento de la velocidad de realización de cualquiera de las fases del proceso de digitalización en tres dimensiones, podría incrementar la cantidad de objetos de los que se obtendría una copia digital en un mismo periodo de tiempo y, en consecuencia, estaríamos en disposición de salvaguardar de una forma más eficiente nuestra herencia cultural. En relación con esta cuestión, diferentes trabajos abordan la digitalización en masa de colecciones preservadas en museos (Collins et al, 2019;Farella et al, 2022;Guidi et al, 2015) pero, por lo general, están basados en dispositivos específicos, muchas veces complejos o de alto valor económico, y que, por tanto, no son asequibles para muchas instituciones.…”