Abstract
Abstract. The advent of technology in digital cameras and their incorporation into virtually any smart mobile device has led to an explosion of the number of photographs taken every day. Today, the number of images stored online and available freely has reached unprecedented levels. It is estimated that in 2011, there were over 100 billion photographs stored in just one of the major social media sites. This number is growing exponentially. Moreover, advances in the fields of Photogrammetry and Computer Vision have led to significant breakthroughs such as the Structure from Motion algorithm which creates 3D models of objects using their twodimensional photographs. The existence of powerful and affordable computational machinery not only the reconstruction of complex structures but also entire cities. This paper illustrates an overview of our methodology for producing 3D models of Cultural Heritage structures such as monuments and artefacts from 2D data (pictures, video), available on Internet repositories, social media, Google Maps, Bing, etc. We also present new approaches to semantic enrichment of the end results and their subsequent export to Europeana, the European digital library, for integrated, interactive 3D visualisation within regular web browsers using WebGl and X3D. Our main goal is to enable historians, architects, archaeologists, urban planners and affiliated professionals to reconstruct views of historical structures from millions of images floating around the web and interact with them.
Highlights
The scope of economic activities of the Cultural and Creative industries focuses on the generation or exploitation of knowledge and information (Hesmondhalgh, 2007)
A lot of work has been done in recent years in the areas of (i) digitisation, especially for tangible cultural objects, (ii) augmented reality and cultural experiences tools, (iii) information retrieval and use and (iv) virtual heritage, digital libraries and Web archiving
For 3D scene reconstruction and flow estimation our approach is based on computer vision and Photogrammetry techniques that require optical flow, as well as, disparity estimation
Summary
The scope of economic activities of the Cultural and Creative industries focuses on the generation or exploitation of knowledge and information (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). The rapid development of 3D visualisation services and their interlinking to other on-line services like Google Search, Google Earth / Maps and Bing has forced digital libraries such as Europeana and UNESCOs Memory of the World to expand their content to include 3D museums objects, archaeological sites and monuments In such a context, digitisation, preservation and online availability of digitised cultural content has always been a top-level priority research. We address the aforementioned difficulties by proposing a complete approach able to search, process, model, 3D reconstruct, define metadata and build new production services and re-use of the CH content In this respect, the rapidly evolving fields of computer graphics, vision and learning, 3D modelling and virtual reality (VR), seems to hold a strong potential for proving effective solutions towards accurate and veridical spatial-temporal urban environment modelling. This way, we construct building time-varying 3D models that contain how the appearance, historical events around a place and structure have been evolved
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