Analyzing the Decorative Style of 3D Heritage Collections Based on Shape Saliency

Abstract

As technologies for 3D acquisition become widely available, it is expected that 3D content documenting heritage artifacts will become increasingly popular. Nevertheless, to provide access to and enable the creative use of this content, it is necessary to address the challenges to its access. These include the automatic enrichment of 3D content with suitable metadata so that content does not get lost. To address these challenges, this article presents research on developing technologies to support the organization and discoverability of 3D content in the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. This research takes advantage of the fact that heritage artifacts have been designed throughout the centuries with distinctive design styles. Hence, the shape and the decoration of an artifact can provide significant information on the history of the artifact. The main contributions of this article include an ontology for documenting 3D representations of heritage artifacts decorated with ornaments such as architectural mouldings. In addition, the article presents a complementary shape retrieval method based on shape saliency to improve the automatic classification of the artifact’s semantic information based on its 3D shape. This method is tested on a collection of Regency ornament mouldings found in domestic interiors. This content provides a rich dataset on which to base the exploration of issues common to many CH artifacts, such as design styles and decorative ornament.