Search

In the field of cultural heritage, a significant amount of research has been conducted to allow domain experts to represent semantic data while keeping spatial references. The organization of architectural shapes in significant concepts, in the context of semantic annotation, is carried out in various ways. This chapter analyzes them, highlighting some substantial questions: the semantic ambiguity and the uncertainty. These questions are addressed after a careful reflection on the theoretical basis for a semantic reading of architecture. The chapter proposes some operative solutions: the use of an international thesaurus to resolve linguistic ambiguity; the coding of semantic maps to solve the annotation uncertainty.

Monitoring, digitizing and archiving museum artworks represent an important socio-cultural accomplishment and an overcoming in digital preservation today. Cultural heritage is constantly under threat of terrorist attacks and natural disaster. The high costs related to documentation task have prevented a constantly and massive survey activity. The low cost 3D image based acquisition and elaboration techniques of an object, allow to carry out a 3D photorealistic model in a short time. Therefore, a lot of museum adopted these techniques for the artworks archiving. Crowdsourcing activities can significantly speed up survey and elaboration procedures. If, on the one hand, these initiatives can have a positive impact, on the other hand involve the online user with a marginal role. In this paper we demonstrate how it is appropriate thinking the museum visitor as “museum operator/maker” of the digital model overstepping the outcomes achieved so far.

Today, the accurate and detailed reconstruction of geometric models of real objects has become a common process. The diffusion of Image-based 3D modeling techniques, through image-based free, low cost and open source software, have increased drastically in the past few years, especially in the sector of Cultural Heritage (Architecture, Archeology, Urban planning). Nevertheless, web based software (ARC3D, 123D Catch, Hyp3D, my3Dscanner) offer another opportunity respect the desktop systems: they use the power of cloud computing to carry out a semi-automatic data processing. In this way is overcome the considerably slowing-down of the computer of hardware-heavy approaches. Our research investigates the limits and potentialities of 3D models obtained by using Autodesk 123D Catch in Architectural Heritage field, in order to verify the applicability of the method for the practitioner purpose. Our goal is to evaluate Catch efficiency, accuracy, constraints and limitations in order to provide insight into the current state of 3D modeling products. Our methodology forecasts the comparison between 123D Catch models and terrestrial laser scanner 3D acquisition in order to verify metric accuracy. Therefore, we propose a lot of interesting examples applied in architectural heritage field from the detail to the large scale.

3D reconstruction from images has undergone a revolution in the last few years. Computer vision techniques use photographs from data set collection to rapidly build detailed 3D models. The simultaneous applications of different algorithms (MVS), the different techniques of image matching, feature extracting and mesh optimization are inside an active field of research in computer vision. The results are promising: the obtained models are beginning to challenge the precision of laser-based reconstructions. Among all the possibilities we can mainly distinguish desktop and web-based packages. Those last ones offer the opportunity to exploit the power of cloud computing in order to carry out a semi-automatic data processing, thus allowing the user to fulfill other tasks on its computer; whereas desktop systems employ too much processing time and hard heavy approaches. Computer vision researchers have explored many applications to verify the visual accuracy of 3D model but the approaches to verify metric accuracy are few and no one is on Autodesk 123D Catch applied on Architectural Heritage Documentation. Our approach to this challenging problem is to compare the 3Dmodels by Autodesk 123D Catch and 3D models by terrestrial LIDAR considering different object size, from the detail (capitals, moldings, bases) to large scale buildings for practitioner purpose.