3D Digitization of Cultural Heritage

The chapter first analyzes the reasons for digitizing Cultural Heritage (CH), tracing the history of applying 3D technologies for the purpose of digitizing CH, and reviewing the current state of the art in the field. A detailed survey is offered for the digitization of different types of both tangible and intangible CH. The latter includes a section about the 3D digitization of damaged or no-longer existing CH monuments for the purpose of creating 3D hypotheses of restoration and reconstruction in virtual archaeology. A methodological section points out which 3D technologies are used in the field and how they can be best applied, taking into account digitization approaches appropriate to the different classes of CH object as well as the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various technologies. This is followed by a discussion of how CH can be modeled from raw data, and a section about the different 3D processing pipelines that can be implemented through active or passive 3D sensing techniques. Finally, a detailed section treats the creation of a 3D content repository for CH, taking into account both the relevant articulated metadata as well as the ways 3D data are stored and visualized for online access.