World's First Automated 3D Digitization of Cultural Treasures

Millions of cultural artifacts exist in our museums. But are these cultural treasures safe there? In the fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia library in Weimar in the year 2004 or when the historical city archive in Cologne collapsed in 2009, numerous works of art were completely destroyed. Preserving our cultural heritage in a digital way is a good possibility of mitigating the impact of such disasters. For around ten years, private, national and international initiatives have been trying to digitally capture and archive cultural treasures. However, these have mainly been limited to 2D artifacts such as book pages, paintings or photographs.

"With CultLab3D, we are presenting, for the first time, a quick, economical approach to digitize cultural heritage in the next, the third dimension", says Pedro Santos of Fraunhofer IGD. His team is developing technologies for a faster digitization and virtual reproduction of objects from the real world in superior quality. CultLab3D not only captures geometry and texture of artifacts but also their optical material properties such as reflection and absorption characteristics for a later photo-realistic representation of their appearance under any lighting conditions.

So far, 3D digitalization has been very expensive and time-consuming. CultLab3D now relies on the industrialization and automation of the entire 3D digitization process of artifacts by means of state-of-the-art scan and lighting technologies. This is how it works: The artifacts pass through special scanning arcs on a conveyor belt. In the process, they are scanned from all sides in a fully automated fashion. In a second step, scanners mounted to lightweight robotic arms are resolve any remaining occlusions and gaps of the so far reconstructed virtual 3D model. The finished 3D model can then be linked to cultural-historic information such as the period of origin, the artist or related artifacts. The entire process only takes a few minutes, compared to several hours before. The mobile digitalization lab CultLab3D makes it possible to scan and archive the millions of existing artifacts industrially, cost-effectively and quickly.