Autonomous 3-D Digitization for Arbitrary Cultural Heritage Objects

This article provides an overview of the challenges and developments of the first autonomous, robot-assisted 3-D digitization approaches that ensure completeness and repeatable high quality of resulting 3-D models for objects of arbitrary shapes and a wide range of materials. The European Cultural Heritage Strategy for the 21st century has spurred demand for fast and efficient 3-D digitization technologies for cultural heritage artifacts. Unlike widely automated 2-D digitization, 3-D often requires significant manual intervention. To address this, at the CultLab3D we developed the CultArm3D, to our knowledge the world's first fully automatic 3-D mass digitization technology, automating the entire process from capturing arbitrary shaped objects to computing the final high-resolution 3-D model as well as all the by-products such as decimated web, AR, 3-D print models, or rendered videos. Addressing the challenges eventually resulted in a technology enabling large-scale, color-faithful capturing and archiving of objects for scientific purposes at the push of a button, producing highly accurate photorealistic representations.