Photometric Aspects on the Preservation of Cultural Assets

Abstract

We recently started a project to construct a digital archive of cultural heritage objects. Besides geometrical preservation, preserving the current appearance of historical assets is an important and urgent component of our project, due to the daily decay and stain of these ancestral statues and buildings. For this purpose, we have been developing frameworks and algorithms to capture the appearance of real world objects accurately and efficiently. In this paper, we will overview several of these algorithms, namely, appearance modeling from a densely/sparsely sampled image sequence, and image-based shape modeling of transparent objects. These methods can synthesize appearance under novel viewing and lighting conditions, which becomes important when building multimedia contents of historical assets, as well as precisely preserving the appearance itself.