3D DIGITIZATION OF MUSEUM CONTENT WITHIN THE 3DICONS PROJECT

Abstract. The main purpose of the European Project "3DIcons" is to digitize masterpieces of Cultural Heritage and provide the related 3D models and metadata to Europeana, an Internet portal that acts as an interface to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe. The purpose of this paper is to define a complete pipeline which covers all technical and logistic aspects for creating 3D models in a Museum environment with no established digitization laboratory, from the 3D data acquisition to the creation of models that has to be searchable on the Internet through Europeana. The research group of Politecnico di Milano is dealing with the 3D modelling of the Archaeological Museum of Milan and most of its valuable content. In this paper an optimized 3D modelling pipeline is shown, that takes into account all the potential problems occurring during the survey and the related data processing. Most of the 3D digitization activity have been made exploiting the Structure From Motion (SfM) technique, handling all the acquisition (e.g. objects enlightenment, camera-object relative positioning, object shape and material, etc.) and processing problems (e.g. difficulties in the alignment step, model scaling, mesh optimization, etc.), but without neglecting the metric rigor of the results. This optimized process has been applied on a significant number of items, showing how this technique can allow large scale 3D digitization projects with relatively limited efforts.