Ambition

Scan4Reco ambition is to pave the way for a new era in cultural heritage digitization, by developing a portable, modular and customizable (thus, cost-effective) solution for the seamless digitization of a plethora of cultural objects, even at their demonstration sites. As such, the project is anticipated to boost the capacity of wide range of cultural heritage institutions and organizations to develop accurate and detailed 3D models of their cultural content, further enhanced with rich semantic spatiotemporal representations, concerning both the object and its context, taking into account how these have evolved through time.

Scan4Reco aims to bring revolutionary innovations in the following domains

• Multi-sensorial scanning, addressing a wide range of multi-spectral technologies like
  • xRF, Infrared scanning
  • Surface optical scanning microprofilometry, semantic feature extraction & reconstruction
  • RTI acquisition, semantic feature extraction & reconstruction
• Multi-sensorial Data Fusion
• Rendering Material features and parameters towards spatiotemporal Simulation
• Multi-scale and multimodal 3D Reconstruction
• Decision Support System
• Degradation Identification and automatic spatiotemporal Annotation
• Visualization
• 3D printing

Objectives

The Scan4Reco project can be summarized through eight cornerstone objectives that will define not only the outcomes of the project but will also shape its workplan and the scheduling of tasks:

• Objective 1:
  To provide an integrated, portable solution based on a modular architecture, for accurate (i.e. via a dedicated motorized mechanical arm) multi-sensorial 3D scanning and efficient automatic digitization of a big variety of cultural/heritage assets even in situ, supporting among others material identification and both surface and volumetric diagnosis.

• Objective 2:
  To apply a hierarchical approach for 3D reconstruction of the object via the successive collection and utilization of the multi-sensorial data in an order of increasing resolution and infiltration factor, making thus, possible, to render the object in a multi-layered way, so as to facilitate its deployment in analysis and 3D printing procedures.

• Objective 3:
  To create high precision and realistic digital surrogates of the cultural assets by also providing detailed insight regarding both the surface but also the volumetric structure, material composition and shape and structure of the underlying materials, so as to render them visible to the unaided eye either via occlusion capable visualization techniques or via transparent multi-material 3D printing.

• Objective 4:
  To apply systematic study and methodical material analysis through state-of-the-art laboratory techniques, so as to understand the heterogeneous nature and complex structures, to identify the broad and varied class of materials and to understand their degradation mechanisms over time, targeting to the extraction of the appropriate parameters able to accurately describe context-dependent ageing models per material.

• Objective 5:
  To spatiotemporally (4D) simulate uni-material models individually based on certain environmental phenomenon modeling (i.e. context-dependent), so as to collectively render imminent degradation effects on the multi-material cultural objects in an attempt to predict and to recreate the appearance of the cultural object in specific times in the future or even to perform reverse engineering so as to achieve the automatic restoration, reaching even back to its original shape.

• Objective 6:
  To indicate, the invisible to an unaided eye, spots/segments of the cultural object that are in eminent conservation need and require special care, while to simultaneously provide suggestions by a dedicated Decision Support System (DSS), regarding the most appropriate conservation method that should be followed,
  in the most comprehensive and analytic way to the conservator via enhanced interactive visualization methods, for both gaining from human intelligence and allowing metadata collection/updating.

• Objective 7:
  To validate the aforementioned actions on real case scenarios involving heterogeneous objects of various sizes and materials, as well as to identify probable research challenges for the future.

• Objective 8:
  To enhance the accessibility of the digitized cultural objects (along with the outcomes of the project) to both the scientific community, the field experts and the general public via the development of a virtual model of a museum where all scanned artifacts will be virtually exposed.