Cultural Heritage Imaging, Preservation, and Research: Advancing Current Imaging Capabilities

Our project over the last year has been working with a technology called "Stereo Photogrammetry," which is a technique that uses multiple photographs to create a 3D model of an object. It's a type of photogrammetry that involves taking multiple images of an object with lighting from different angles to create various shadows that are then used to reconstruct the 2D image into a 3D model. We are using this technology to assist the Museum Studies department in creating 3D topology maps of various artifacts, scrolls, and dated scripts. An example of how they would use this technology would be to study different ink thicknesses that were used on old scripts and maybe pinpoint if different people wrote on the page at different times. We created a frame out of 80/20 Aluminum and attached lights in various positions around a camera in the center. An object would be placed at the base of the frame, and then, one at a time, a light would turn on, and the camera would take a picture. This would repeat until all the lights had been run through. Each image would be run through some image processing software to perform the proper calculations to convert the 2D images to one 3D model. The visitor experience could involve doing live demos of image collection while using the frame and lights. The image processing part may not be viable due to the large processing time that is required. We could just have a booth somewhere with the entire frame and lights, and then we could provide photos and videos of the entire image collection and processing components. If we were to do live demos, we would need a dark space to take the images.