Advances in 3D Scanning Analysis for Cultural Heritage Applications

Dear Colleagues,

According to “UNESCO, ICCROM, ICOMOS (1994)” (Nara Document on Authenticity, article 13. http://www.international.icomos.org/charters/nara e.htm/) recommendations, a primary objective of cultural heritage (CH) is preservation of the authenticity and integrity of archaeological escavations and finds. At present, important activities for preservation include:

• Archaeological excavation including field and underwater excavations;
• Archaeological research, devoting to finding the historical, artistic, and scientific value of relics and investigating the historical process, the state of civilization, and the technological level;
• Archive management, making possible to collect, record, organize, add, delete, and modify information about relics.
• Conservation, monitoring, storing safely, and restoring heritage items;
• Exhibition, including exhibitions in museums, onsite, or on the Web;
• Utilization of cultural heritage, realized by film, television, game production, imitation, printing, and publications.

The traditional techniques for performing the above-mentioned preservation activities in CH have proven to be time-consuming and not repeatable or reproducible, as they strongly depend on operators’ skills. For these reasons, the traditional techniques have been progressively flanked by digital ones, which have also led to the introduction of new revolutionary approaches to preservation activities.

All these new methodologies require a three-dimensional digitalization of archeological escavations and finds; the current techniques are: acquisition range from images and videos (e.g., photogrammetry, depth-cameras, structure from motion), laser scanning techniques (e.g., structured light 3D scanning, laser 3D scanning), spectral imagining (e.g., reflectance spectral imaging, multi- or hyper- spectral imaginig, X-ray fluorescence spectrometry). Nevertheless, the geometric data, as those obtained by means of each of the above mentioned technicques, cannot be directly used for finds preservation: it only provides low-level information limited to point coordinates and the normal of triangles enclosing it. Data processing becomes, therefore, necessary in order to perform each of above-mentioned preservation activities.

This special issue, entitled "Advances in 3D Scanning analysis for Cultural Heritage Applications", will focus on all innovative aspects of the research and development related in this field. Original research papers that focus on the development and experimental verification of computer-based algorithms for archaeological fields are welcome.

We invite authors to contribute both reviews and original research articles that will illustrate and stimulate the continuing research in this field. Reviews should provide an up-to-date overview of the current state-of-the-art in a particular application and include main results from several research groups.

Prof. Dr. Luca Di Angelo
Dr. Silvia Biasotti
Guest Editors

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• Automatic feature recognition
• Computer methods in Archaeology
• Surface segmentation
• 3D archaeology