Practical 3D Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage Artefacts from Photographs – Potentials and Issues

Abstract

A new technology is on the rise that allows the 3D-reconstruction of Cultural Heritage objects from image sequences taken by ordinary digital cameras. We describe the first experiments we made as early adopters in a community-funded research project whose goal is to develop it into a standard CH technology. The paper describes in detail a step-by-step procedure that can be reproduced using free tools by any CH professional. We also give a critical assessment of the workflow and describe several ideas for developing it further into an automatic procedure for 3D reconstruction from images.

Keywords

• 3D reconstruction
• Photogrammetry
• 3D acquisition
• 3D scanning
• ARC3D
• Meshlab