Combining contour matching and visual hull information for 3D reconstruction of archeological objects

Museums are interested in the digitizing of their collections not only for the sake of preserving the cultural heritage, but also to make the information content accessible to the wider public in a manner that is attractive. Computer vision techniques are widely used to create virtual museum exhibitions both in a museum environment through informative kiosks or on the World Wide Web. Such 3D exhibition makes the digital content viewed through the internet from anywhere in the world, without moving objects or visiting really the sites. In this paper, 3D reconstruction of archaeological objects is done using the ”shape from silhouette” approach with an affine contours matching method for the refinement of the obtained models. Starting from a silhouettes sequence, the algorithm constructs a coarse visual hull of the object. Then, using affine-invariant contour matching we proceed iteratively to refine the initial mesh and to obtain a more accurate 3D model.