VAST12: The 13th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Intelligent Cultural Heritage

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Authoring Animated Interactive 3D Museum Exhibits using a Digital Repository
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Zmugg, René; Thaller, Wolfgang; Hecher, Martin; Schiffer, Thomas; Havemann, Sven; Fellner, Dieter W.; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
We present the prototype of a software system to streamline the serial production of simple interactive 3D animations for the display in museum exhibitions. We propose dividing the authoring process in two phases, a designer phase and a curator phase. The designer creates a set of configurable 3D scene templates that fit with the look of the physical exhibition while the curator inserts 3D models and configures the scene templates; the finished scenes are uploaded to 3D kiosks in the museum. Distinguishing features of our system are the tight integration with an asset repository and the simplified scene graph authoring. We demonstrate the usefulness with a few examples.
Vectorising Building Footprints From Historic Maps
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Brown, Philip G.; Laycock, Stephen D.; Day, Andy M.; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Historic maps provide fascinating insights into the growth and development of cities over large time periods, and often the places they document have changed dramatically since their creation. However, rasterised image data is limited in that it is not easily manipulatable, for either analysis or presentation of data, and it is not easy to use the data as a basis for reconstructions. If it were possible to extract vector outlines for building footprints from the map then these limitations would be removed, and the vector outlines could easily be used as a basis for three dimensional models representing the buildings. Manually defining building outlines from maps is a laborious process and so this paper investigates the use of image processing techniques to enable a semi-automatic process to detect vector outlines of buildings from a variety of maps and to optimise the output for use as a basis for creating large scale three dimensional reconstructions.
Archaeological Field Documentation and Architectonic Analysis - a 3D Approach. Ein Zippori as Study Case
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Hermon, Sorin; Khalaily, Hamudi; Milevski, Ianir; Amico, Nicola; Iannone, Giancarlo; Getzov, Nimrod; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
A key element in any archaeological excavation is an accurate recording of the excavated material. Since the ar-chaeological process by itself is one of destruction, the need for an accurate documentation becomes even more imperious; when dealing with rescue excavations, where in most cases sites will be completely destroyed or in the best cases covered for posterity, the problem is augmented again. Another challenge is how to obtain an outcome that will serve later on archaeologists to understand their site and prepare an accurate scientific report, and have materials ready for a comprehensive publication. The paper presents the implications, advantages and challenges on using 3D documentation at rescue excavations, as preliminary experimented at the site of Ein Zippori, Israel. These were partially developed during the 3D-COFORM project, aiming at creating affordable 3D technologies and methodologies for the Cultural Heritage sector.
Petroglyph Classification using the Image Distortion Model
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Deufemia, Vincenzo; Paolino, Luca; Lumley, Henry de; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Petroglyphs are prehistoric engravings in stone unrevealing stories of ancient life and describing a conception of the world transmitted till today. The great number of sites and the high variability in the artifacts makes their study a very complex task. Thus, the development of tools which automate the recognition of petroglyphs is essential not only for supporting archaeologist to understand petroglyph symbols and relationships, but also for the anthropologists who are interested in the evolution of human beings. However, many challenges exist in the recognition of petroglyph reliefs mainly due to their high level of distortion and variability. To address these challenges, in this paper we present an automatic image-based petroglyph recognizer that focuses on the visual appearance of the petroglyph in order to assess the similarity of petroglyph reliefs. The proposed matching algorithm is based on an image deformation model that is computationally efficient and robust to local distortions. The classification system has been applied to an image database containing 17 classes of petroglyph symbols from Mount Bego rock art site achieving a classification rate of 68 percent.
Building Scholar e-communities Using a Semantically Aware Framework: Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia Digital Corpus
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Pitzalis, Denis; Christophorou, Elina; Kyriakou, Niki; Georgiadou, Aristoula; Niccolucci, Franco; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Web-based learning communities have developed into a very popular vehicle for sharing information amongst students, researchers and enthusiastic users and are slowly gaining importance in the humanities field. Unfortunately, as data organization and information exchange in such communities are usually unstructured and strongly geo-localized, they generate serious interoperability issues. At the same time, an increasing amount of knowledge based resources is made available on the Web and a lot of effort is put into creating reference ontologies for the Cultural Heritage, actively publishing controlled vocabularies and sharing data across different platforms by using RDF and RDFa. In this context and with the objective to consolidate these two independent efforts, we have developed a platform for advanced structured online collaboration as a framework for advanced e-learning, the Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia Digital Corpus (AKGDC). Our Digital Library supports exchange amongst researchers, educators and students, makes heterogeneous data resources available and easily reusable and suggests semantic relations within the resources. The AKGDC framework is based on a rather comprehensive corpus of the ancient Cypriot literature, the six-volume ''Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia'', or Arca´ia Kupriak ´h Gra ate´ia authored by A. Voskos, K. Michaelides and I. G. Taifacos and published by the Leventis Foundation between 1995 and 2008. The corpus covers the ancient Cypriot literary production of approximately thirteen centuries (from 7th century BC to 5th-6th century AD), and is typically classified by literary genres. This paper describes how the Digital Library has been conceptualized, developed and enriched. We expect our DL to positively impact highly interdisciplinary areas, such as Classical philology, archaeology, epigraphics, history, religion, philosophy, as well as to provide a broad utility service across the scholarly community.
Automatic Image Selection in Photogrammetric Multi-view Stereo Methods
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Hosseininaveh, Ali; Serpico, Margaret; Robson, Stuart; Hess, Mona; Boehm, Jan; Pridden, Ivor; Amati, Giancarlo; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
This paper brings together a team of specialists in optical metrology, museum curation, collection digitization and 3D development to describe and illustrate by example a method for the selection of the most suitable camera views, vantage viewpoints, from a large image dataset intended for metric 3D artefact reconstruction. The presented approach is capable of automatically identifying and processing the most appropriate images from a multi-image photogrammetric network captured by an imaging specialist. The aim is to produce a 3D model suited to a wide range of museum uses, including visitor interactives. The approach combines off-the-shelf imaging equipment with rigorous photogrammetric bundle adjustment and multi-view stereo (MVS), supported by an image selection process that is able to take into account range-related and visibility-related constraints. The paper focusses on the two key steps of image clustering and iterative image selection. The developed method is illustrated by the 3D recording of four ancient Egyptian artefacts from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL, with an analysis taking into account completeness, coordination uncertainty and required number of images. Comparison is made against the baseline of the established CMVS (Clustering Views for Multi-view Stereo), which is a free package for selecting vantage images within a huge image collection. For the museum, key outputs from the 3D recording process are visitor interactives which are built around high quality textured mesh models. The paper therefore considers the quality of the output from each process as input to texture model generation. Results demonstrate that whilst both methods can provide high quality records, our new method, Image Network Designer (IND), can provide a better image selection for MVS than CMVS in terms of coordination uncertainty and completeness of the final model for the museum recording of artefacts. Furthermore, the improvements gained, particularly in model completeness, minimise the significant overhead in mesh editing needed to provide a more direct and economical route to 3D model output.
3D Reconstruction and Virtual Exploration of Submerged Structures: a Case Study in the Underwater Archaeological Site of Baia (Italy)
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Gallo, Alessandro; Angilica, Agostino; Bianco, Gianfranco; Filippo, Francesco De; Muzzupappa, Maurizio; Davidde, Barbara; Bruno, Fabio; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
The 3D reconstruction of underwater scenes is almost a requirement for a number of applications that need to gather 3D data from fauna, flora or submerged structures. In the Cultural Heritage field, 3D models of finds and archaeological sites are widely used, either for scientific research or for dissemination to the public. 3D imaging techniques based on multi-view capture are a valid and effective tool in underwater applications, because they require to capture the scene by different viewpoints using just one still or movie camera, installed on robots or handled by a scuba diver. In this paper we test a technique for 3D reconstructions from images captured by multiple views in a case study of submerged structures in the underwater archaeological site of Baia (Italy). This case study is particularly critical due to the high level of turbidity, the heavy presence of marine flora and the changing of lighting conditions, common in shallow water. All these disturbances cause a decrease of the contrast and an alteration of the colours in the acquired images. The 3D model of a portion of the site has been reconstructed in a virtual environment, both for studying and dissemination fruition purposes. In particular, a 3D application has been developed in order to allow the exploration of the site, the measurement of the architectonical elements and the simulation of the movements of a robot that performs specific operations of restoration and preservation.
Parametric 3D-fitted Frames for Packaging Heritage Artefacts
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Sá, Asla M.; Echavarria, Karina Rodriguez; Griffin, Martin; Covill, Derek; Kaminski, Jaime; Arnold, David; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Packing fragile heritage artefacts is a challenge almost all heritage organisations have to deal with when faced with the task of transporting or storing the artefacts. The packaging solution requires fitting the artefact correctly in order to ensure the protection and safety of the item; but also to be easy and cost effective to produce. Different techniques have been traditionally used, such as double boxing, padding negative spaces and cushioning braces. However, the introduction of 3D technologies for documenting these artefacts enables innovative uses of this data for packaging purposes. Hence, this paper proposes the use of the generative modelling language in order to produce unique 3D-fitted containers for packaging heritage artefacts which fit tightly the artefact, and can be made to be reusable and more durable than traditional packaging solutions. We propose to adopt an octet lattice as a low density internal structure to the proposed container. By combining the parametric package design, 3D meshes acquisition and 3D printing techniques, we present a technology based solution to the traditional problem of protecting these valuable artefacts for transportation and/or storing purposes.
PileBars: Scalable Dynamic Thumbnail Bars
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Brivio, Paolo; Tarini, Marco; Ponchio, Federico; Cignoni, Paolo; Scopigno, Roberto; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
We introduce PileBars, a new class of animated thumbnail-bars supporting browsing of large image datasets (hundreds or thousands of images). Since the bar is meant to be just one element of a GUI, it covers only a small portion of the screen; yet it provides a global view of the entire dataset, without any scrolling panel. Instead, thumbnails are dynamically rearranged, resized and reclustered into adaptive layouts during the entire browsing process. The objective is to enable the user both to accurately pinpoint a specific image (even among semantically close ones), and to jump anywhere to ''distant'' parts of the dataset. The thumbnail layouts proposed maximize also the temporal coherence, thus allowing for smooth animations from one layout to the next. The system is very general: it can be driven by any application-specific image-to-image semantic distance function, and respects any user-defined total ordering of the images; the ordering can be either inferred from the semantic or be chosen independently from it, depending on the application. The applicability of the resulting system is tested in a number of practical applications and fits very well the issues in management of Cultural Heritage image collections.
Insourcing, Outsourcing and Crowdsourcing 3D Collection Formation: Perspectives for Cultural Heritage Sites
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Kaminski, Jaime; Echavarria, Karina Rodriguez; Arnold, David; Palma, Gianpaolo; Scopigno, Roberto; Proesmans, Marc; Stevenson, James; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
This paper presents three different propositions for cultural heritage organisations on how to digitise objects in 3D. It is based on the practical evaluation of three different deployment experiments that use different methods and business models for mass 3D-acquisition. These models are: developing the skills of in-house staff within an organisation, the use of external professionals and using crowdsourcing as a mechanism for developing the 3D collection. Furthermore, the paper provides an analysis of these models, lessons learned and practical recommendations for cultural heritage organisations. The analysis includes considerations of issues such as strategy, size of the organisation, skills, equipment, object accessibility and complexity as well as the cost, time and quality of the 3D technology. The paper concludes that most organisations are able to develop 3D collections but variations in the result will be reflected by the strategic approach they place on innovative 3D technologies.
Interactive Exploration of Gigantic Point Clouds on Mobile Devices
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Rodriguez, Marcos Balsa; Gobbetti, Enrico; Marton, Fabio; Pintus, Ruggero; Pintore, Giovanni; Tinti, Alex; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
New embedded CPUs that sport powerful graphics chipsets have the potential to make complex 3D applications feasible on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a scalable architecture and its implementation for mobile exploration of large point clouds, which are nowadays ubiquitous in the cultural heritage domain thanks to the increased performance and availability of 3D scanning techniques. The quality and performance of our approach is demonstrated on gigantic point clouds, interactively explored on Apple iPad and iPhone devices using in variety of network settings. Applications of the technology include on-site exploration during scanning campaigns and promotion of cultural heritage artifacts.
Semantically Rich 3D Documentation for the Preservation of Tangible Heritage
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Echavarria, Karina Rodriguez; Theodoridou, Maria; Georgis, Christos; Arnold, David; Doerr, Martin; Stork, Andre; Serna, Sebastian Peña; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Traditionally, 3D acquisition technologies have been used to record heritage artefacts and to support specific tasks such as conservation or provenance verification. These exercises are usually a one-off as the technology and resources required are cost intensive. However, there is a recent impetus on the creation of 3D collections to document heritage artefacts which are semantically enriched by using annotations. A requirement of these solutions is the ability to support several representations of a heritage artefact recorded through time. This paper will propose an infrastructure to systematically enrich 3D shapes in a collection by using propagated annotations. In addition, it will describe the mechanisms for annotating, propagating and structuring the annotations using the CIDOC-CRM ontology. The results of this research have the potential to support heritage organisations in making their semantically rich 3D content available to a wider audience of professionals.
Digital Techniques for Etruscan Graves: the Etruscanning Project
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Adami, Andrea; Carlani, R.; Kampen, I. van; Pietroni, Eva; Sannibale, M.; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Etruscanning is a project founded by the European Commission and it focuses on the investigation of new digitization and presentation techniques, in order to re-create the original context of the Etruscan graves. Several digital techniques have been applied for the stages of digitization, virtual restoration and reconstruction and communication. The possibility of working on two different tombs allows us to deep two specific approaches and to diversify the final real-time applications. This project represents an interesting opportunity to create a concrete link between research and communication in the field of virtual museums, testing the effective impact in terms of cultural transmission, learning and appreciation both in non-linear narrative plots conception and in novel metaphors of interaction. From a technological point of view the most innovative result of the project is the implementation of natural interaction interfaces, allowing the public to move and interact with objects inside the virtual environment.
Developing Open-Source Software for Art Conservators
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Kim, Min H.; Rushmeier, Holly; ffrench, John; Passeri, Irma; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Art conservators now have access to a wide variety of digital imaging techniques to assist in examining and documenting physical works of art. Commonly used techniques include hyperspectral imaging, 3D scanning and medical CT imaging. However, most of the digital image data requires specialized software to view. The software is often associated with a particular type of acquisition device, and professional knowledge and experience is needed for each type of data. In addition, these software packages are often focused on particular applications (such as medicine or remote sensing) and are not designed to allow the free exploitation of these expensively acquired digital data. In this paper, we address two practical barriers in using the high-tech digital data in art conservation. First, there is the barrier of dealing with a wide variety of interfaces specialized for applications outside of art conservation. We provide an open-source software tool with a single intuitive user interface that can handle various types of 2/3D image data consistent with the needs of art conservation. Second, there is the barrier that previous software has been focused on a single data type. The software presented here is designed and structured to integrate various types of digital imaging data, including as yet unspecified data types, in an integrated environment. This provides conservators the free navigation of various imaging information and allows them to integrate the different types of imaging observations.
Interactive Semantic Enrichment of 3D Cultural Heritage Collections
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Serna, Sebastian Peña; Schmedt, Hendrik; Ritz, Martin; Stork, Andre; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Virtual Surrogates of Cultural Heritage (CH) objects are seriously being considered in professional activities such as conservation and preservation, exhibition planning, packing, and scholarly research, among many other activities. Although this is a very positive development, a bare 3D digital representation is insufficient and poor for fulfilling the full range of professional activities. In this paper, we present the first interactive semantic enrichment tool for 3D CH collections that is fully based on the CIDOC-CRM schema and that fully supports its sophisticated annotation model. The tool eases the user interaction, allowing inexperienced users without previous knowledge on semantic models or 3D modeling to employ it and to conceive it for the professional workflow on 3D annotations. We illustrate the capabilities of our tool in the context of the Saalburg fort, during Roman times (2nd century AD), for the protection of the Limes on the Taunus hills in Germany.
Structuring and Embedding Image Captions: the V.I.F. Multi-modal System
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Vasconcelos, Cristina N.; Sá, Asla M.; Sá, Marcio I.; Carvalho, Paulo Cezar P.; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
Within the context of historical photographic annotated collections, we observe the frequent occurrence of some subsets of important characters, usually described in captions. For many years, image captions were annotated using natural language texts intended to be read by humans. Today, the information retrieval of structured information is appealing and the migration of natural language captions to structured information is desirable in a variety of photographic collections. In this paper, we describe the Very Important Faces (V.I.F.) system, which is designed to graphically document the occurrence of distinguished characters within photographic collections and store this information in a structured format useful for retrieval purposes. The V.I.F. system implements face detection in the image data and detects proper names in previously inserted captions if any are present. The user matches names to faces throughout the software interface in order to produce a photo annotation that is stored considering structured information principles. Once the matching is done, an efficient verification tool is proposed, which helps the expert to review the annotation, taking advantage of such multi-modal databases. The concept of annotation maturity level is also introduced.
Large-scale Immersive Reconstitution of a Neolithic Corbel Dome
(The Eurographics Association, 2012) Gaugne, Ronan; Barreau, Jean-Baptiste; Cousseau, Florian; Gouranton, Valérie; David Arnold and Jaime Kaminski and Franco Niccolucci and Andre Stork
We propose a workflow of tools and procedures to reconstruct an existing archaeological site as a virtual 3D reconstitution in a large scale immersive system. This interdisciplinary endeavor, gathering archaeologists and virtual reality computer scientists, is the first step of a joint research project with three objectives: (i) propose a common workflow to reconstruct archaeological sites as 3D models in fully immersive systems, (ii) provide archaeologists with tools and interaction metaphors to exploit immersive reconstitutions, and (iii) develop the use and access of immersive systems to archaeologists. In this context, we present results from the immersive reconstitution of Carn's monument central chamber, in Finistère, France, a site currently studied by the Creaah archaeology laboratory. The results rely on a detailed workflow we propose, which uses efficient solutions to enable archaeologists to work with immersive systems. In particular, we proposed a procedure to model the central chamber of the Carn monument, and compare several softwares to deploy it in an imersive structure. We then proposed two immersive implementations of the central chamber, with simple interaction tools, and finally describe the European project Visionair which provides access to high level visualization facilities.

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