GCH 2024 - Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing GCH 2024 - Eurographics Workshop on Graphics and Cultural Heritage by Issue Date
Now showing 1 - 20 of 34
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item DeepHadad: Enhancing the Readability of Ancient Northwest Semitic Inscriptions(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Aioanei, Andrei C.; Klein, Jonathan; Klein, Konstantin M.; Hunziker-Rodewald, Regine R.; Michels, Dominik L.; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanWe present DeepHadad, a novel deep learning approach to improve the readability of severely damaged ancient Northwest Semitic inscriptions. By leveraging concepts of displacement maps and image-to-image translation, DeepHadad effectively recovers text from barely recognizable inscriptions, such as the one on the Hadad statue. A main challenge is the lack of pairs of well-preserved and damaged glyphs as training data since each available glyph instance has a unique shape and is not available in different states of erosion. We overcome this issue by generating synthetic training data through a simulated erosion process, on which we then train a neural network that successfully generalizes to real data. We demonstrate significant improvements in readability and historical authenticity compared to existing methods, opening new avenues for AI-assisted epigraphic analysis.Item WebXR Cultural Heritage Tour with Generative AI Characters(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Zöllner, Michael; Gemeinhardt, Jan; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanThis paper presents a project focused on enhancing cultural heritage experiences through a WebXR application by integrating generative AI characters. The application, designed for the Fichtelgebirge region in Upper Franconia, Germany, offers users an immersive digital time travel experience within a museum setting. Structured into six interconnected scenes, each representing a different historical period, the WebXR tour features AI-enhanced historic characters that interactively narrate stories and showcase artifacts. Key elements include animated speaking portraits, interactive 3D models, 360-degree panoramas, and style-transferred historic imagery. The project aims to connect physical museum objects with virtual experiences, enriching the user's engagement with local culture and regional identity. Compatible with multiple devices, including VR headsets, web browsers, and mobile devices, the application ensures broad accessibility and cross-media functionality.Item MiDRASH - A Project for Computational Analysis of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Vasyutinsky Shapira, Daria; Kurar-Barakat, Berat; Gogawale, Sharva; Suliman, Mohammad; Dershowitz, Nachum; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanMiDRASH is an international effort that aims to construct a groundbreaking interdisciplinary methodology for a global approach to the study of the treasure trove of medieval literary manuscripts in Hebrew script. It studies materiality, textuality, transmission and historical contexts of the digitized manuscripts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and other vernacular languages.Item Computer-Assisted Collaborative Fragment Matching of Incomplete Stone Artifacts(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Houska, Peter; Masur, Alessandra; Kloiber, Simon; Lengauer, Stefan; Karl, Stephan; Preiner, Reinhold; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanArchaeological artifacts are often only preserved in fragments. Their reassembly is thus a common task for conservators and archaeologists. Unfortunately, this reassembly process is anything but trivial. Major complicating factors are given if fragments are (1) eroded and weathered, (2) incomplete and missing, and (3) expose little to no geometric surface features or surface-color variations. Artifacts made of white marble, which was generally used in antiquity, pose an additional challenge for reassembly due to (4) their weight and (5) the fragility of the crystalline material. This holds for both freestanding marble sculptures and relief stones or otherwise decorated slabs. In this work, we focus on the reassembly problem of marble slabs with a flat surface, for which fragments are pre-oriented such that their top faces point upward. While computer-based reassembly algorithms exist, they are typically tuned for specific types of artifacts and rely on joining fragments based on a combination of a geometric and surface-color correspondence. Hence, methods that reassemble broken and deteriorated white marble slabs typically perform worse than the respective domain experts. Due to the foreseeable shortcomings of reassembly algorithms when applied to eroded, incomplete, and widely feature-less white marble fragments, we refrain from designing an algorithm for the specific problem at hand. Instead, we incorporate a large number of users from the broad public in the reassembly process. To that end, we provide an intuitive interactive web platform that allows users access to 3D digital twins of the Christian marble-slab fragments. Transferring the fragments to the virtual domain also enables the introduction of algorithmic automatisms to assist the users in the process. In this paper, we present the system design and the provided basic geometric automatisms, and report on their efficiency and utilization in an ongoing large-scale citizen-science experiment that involves several thousand users.Item Dancing through Time: Walking through a Dance Audiovisual Archive(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Alliata, Giacomo; Kenderdine, Sarah; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanDancing through Time is an interactive installation created to discover the Prix de Lausanne archive, a collection of dance performance recordings over fifty-one years. It consists of a 4k-touch screen mounted on a twelve-meter rail, allowing visitors to walk through the fifty-one editions of the Prix de Lausanne dance competition. This paper presents the installation and the results of an extensive evaluation of users' questionnaires. Our main findings validate Dancing through Time in terms of User Experience and User Engagement, indicating that receiving prior instructions only affects the latter. Furthermore, the interaction logs with the application inform us of the benefits of browsing through the entire collection thanks to the affordances of the interactive system. Finally, we extracted different users' interaction behaviours to understand better how visitors engaged with Dancing through Time in the situated context of the 2024 edition of the Prix.Item Immersive Exploration of Ancestral Graphs with TamVR - Design, Evaluation, and Application to Marie Antoinette(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Baikova, Ekaterina; Schreck, Tobias; Preiner, Reinhold; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanAncestral information, or historic family information, is instrumental in understanding the origin of families and persons. The ancestral information of European nobility is of key importance to understanding historic properties and developments of regions, countries, and their interrelationships. Genealogical information is hence a historic and cultural heritage of highest importance. While historic ancestral information is typically well-curated by historians, its exploration, analysis, and exhibition is often limited by existing tools, especially, limitations of exploring and visualizing ancestral graphs. Recent graph visualization offers advanced visualization and interaction facilities to efficiently and effectively navigate and explore ancestral data sets. The previously introduced Topographic Attribute Maps (TAM) visualization integrates relationship and timeline information in a dense topographic visualization. While the original implementation was focused on desktop-based visual exploration, we propose an immersive analytics design and implementation. We introduce a novel, appropriate and information-rich landscape and settlement/family metaphor and belonging interaction and exploration facilities. Our design supports the engaging and at the same time, effective perception of rich ancestral relationship and temporal data properties. The navigation and mapping facilities invite users to explore the ancestral graph information.We show the usage and effectiveness of our immersive approach by a use case discussion and qualitative feedback obtained from evaluation sessions.Item A First Digital Reconstruction of the so-Called Armor of Theoderic(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Collina, Federica; Fabbri, Francesca; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanCultural heritage is continuously subject to numerous risk factors that threaten and compromise its integrity, hence the need to activate effective risk mitigation practices. Increasingly, digital methodologies are contributing to this field, which enables the combination of operations for documentation, preservation, and enhancement of cultural heritage. The same techniques can be profitably and equally applied for now lost objects reconstruction: together with verified historical sources, using these technologies would allow the recovery of models as consistent and faithful. Based on this meta disciplinary approach between historical-philological research and digital technologies, a reconstruction project of the so-called armor of Theoderic is proposed. Different workflows and the data collected and produced will be made explicitly open, allowing cooperation processes in an Open Science perspective. This first 3D model of the so-called armor of Theoderic may be the basis for multiple possible uses to make an iconic object of great cultural significance usable again to the public and the scientific community.Item Colour Fidelity-respecting Workflow for Digital Cultural Heritage Preservation and Documentation(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Barbero-Álvarez, Miguel Antonio; Brenner, Simon; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanColour is considered a representative characteristic of material cultural heritage pieces, especially when documenting them. Especially under digitalization processes, colour needs to be handled and preserved with care, given that digital tools may introduce uncontrolled variations in its representation, if not irreversibly lose it to certain degrees. This work aims to present an empirical workflow in order to successfully respect colour integrity when performing photogrammetry as a cultural heritage documentation asset. An experimental battery based on different combinations of acquisition conditions, RGB debayering, calibration and photogrammetry is presented, and based on the most successful parameters, conclusions are drawn for building guidelines for the optimum performance. The fact that control must be held over all processes to avoid undesired losses of information has been regarded as the highest priority, with the sole exception of the unpredictable colour blending operations during the proper photogrammetry. This paper ultimately demonstrates that preservation of colour information can be achieved on an excellent degree, and that having control over the factors of acquisition and colour digitalization parameters contributes to its success.Item Co-Presence with Skeletons: A Multi-User Immersive Augmented Reality Demonstration in Cultural Heritage(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Bitter, Jessica L.; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanIn this demonstration description, a prototype is presented that addresses the problem of isolation caused by single-user Augmented Reality (AR) applications used on cultural heritage (CH) sites. Using Microsoft's HoloLens 2 and Android smartphones, multiple visitors can experience the playful AR space together. Visitors follow a virtual guide together whereby authors can customize to how many users the system reacts, and engage in a labeling game in which visitors can collaboratively match Latin names and human bones to physical vertebrates' bones.Item UNICiv: A Universal Navigation Interface to Civilization(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Liu, Yuhan; Tucker, C.; Badler, Norman; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanInteractive digital maps are a popular application on mobile devices for navigation, exploration, and virtual travel. Extensive three-dimensional datasets now cover most of the earth with detailed terrain, structures, and transportation networks as they exist contemporaneously. What the world looked like in the ancient past, near the beginnings of human civilization, is more difficult to discover, search, and visualize in a consistently organized temporal and geospatial fashion. UNICiv is built on the Cesium open source 3D Tiles standard to accommodate heterogeneous datasets and leverages visualization in Unreal Engine. UNICiv is an extensible, universal, spatiotemporal interface into the extant 3D modeled structures of the distant past.Item Wedge Detection for Predictive Graphical Annotation of Cuneiform Tablets in 3D(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Bullenkamp, Jan Philipp; Mara, Hubert; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanAs Digital Ancient Near Studies (DANES) and Ancient Language Processing (ALP) require larger volumes of annotated documents, we focus on automatically computed graphical annotations for cuneiform tablets, which are among the oldest documents spanning at least three millennia of human history. Cuneiform consists of wedges imprinted on clay tablets, which are best captured by high-resolution 3D acquisition. Existing Open Access 3D models are therefore our data base and have been postprocessed by the GigaMesh software framework, which ensures clean meshes and provides MSII filter responses. This refers to the Gaussian curvature, which is a function value for each vertex of the mesh used for watersheds along the 2D manifold. Watershed labels are determined by non-minimum suppression using a merge parameter. The label contours, i.e., the polygonal lines enclosing the wedges, are smoothed using the Savitzky-Golay filter with the goal of projecting a low-poly line in 2D that can be quickly corrected by the image-based annotation tool known as Cuneur, which allows experts to annotate wedges, signs and semantics. Once the wedges have been determined, wedge types can be automatically proposed using the orientation of the wedges, which is the first step towards a paleographic representation of cuneiform signs, known as PaleoCode.Item The Virtual Kemenate Thurnau(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Guthe, Michael; Mühlnikel, Marcus; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanMuseums increasingly use interactive installations to give the visitor access to remote places and bring the past back to life. This is especially interesting when artifacts cannot be brought to the museum since they were sold or otherwise lost. In this project, we have partially reconstructed the Giech's family exhibition in Thurnau Castle. The exhibition ended when the family had to sell the exhibits in the 19th century because of financial problems. The goal of the project is to fully reconstruct the part of the exhibition that was shown in the Red Room. In addition, we used virtual reality interaction techniques to reproduce the experience of the earl himself showing his exhibits and to make the exhibition more immersive and accessible.Item Story Inspiration Station: Encouraging Deeper Engagement with Museum Objects(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Bowen, Simon J.; Rowling, H. C.; Kirk, D.; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanInteractive technologies can support new forms of engagement with Cultural Heritage sites and collections, including participatory interpretation and the production of polyvocal narratives that might challenge the Authorised Heritage Discourse. To explore this potential, we developed Story Inspiration Station (an interactive museum exhibit using digitised museum objects to prompt reflective engagement amongst visitors), which allowed us to investigate how an interactive exhibit can enable and scaffold deeper engagement with objects and democratises their interpretation through visitors' exploration of their own and other's responses to them. Through content analysis of system use and visitor responses (1,514 submissions) and thematic analysis of visitor interviews (n=8) and survey responses (n=6) we provide insights into strategies for deepening engagement with heritage objects and for challenging dominant discourses and provide design considerations for others seeking to digitally support polyvocal engagement with museum collections.Item The Fabric of Mixed-Reality Museal Spaces(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Ohl, Stephan; Wagner, Martin; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanRecent advances in eXtended Reality (XR) technology give museums many novel and exciting possibilities for designing interactive exhibition spaces. This short article overviews MIREMUS, a theory that formalizes and unifies the abstract description of such mixed-reality museal spaces. Spatial computing devices can mix real space and digital content in a multitude of different ways. MIREMUS provides a systematic description that has been developed with archeological and cultural heritage museums in mind. Emphasis is put on describing changes over time and qualitatively distinguishing between factual artifacts and hypothesized context. Furthermore, MIREMUS is based on a conceptual abstraction of tele-immersion. This enables us to systematically describe novel museum concepts that join multiple real locations with virtual content into one distributed museal space.Item Applying BRDF Monotonicity for Refined Shading Normal Extraction from Multi-Light Image Collections(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Pintus, Ruggero; Zorcolo, Antonio; Gobbetti, Enrico; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanMulti-Light Image Collections (MLICs) are often transformed into geometric normals and BRDF normals for visual exploration under novel illumination. However, discrepancies between the chosen BRDF space and the complete optical behavior of objects, along with the possible presence of non-local lighting effects in measurements, often lead to sub-optimal visual outcomes even with the most accurate geometric normal recovery. In this paper, we introduce a modular component designed to convert the geometric normals into well-behaved shading normals, under the common and general assumption that the reflectance must be a monotonic function of the angle between the shading normal and the bisector of lighting and viewing directions. Since it does not require the coupling of shape and material estimation, the module allows seamless integration into existing reconstruction pipelines, supporting the mixing and matching of Photometric Stereo methods, BRDF models, and BRDF fitters. The performance and versatility of the approach are demonstrated through experiments.Item Towards a Collaborative Authoring Tool for Cultural Heritage Applications: Modelling the Development Process Between Curators and Developers(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Southall, Ethan; Hulusic, Vedad; John, David; Hargood, Charlie; Ó hOisín, Niall; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanBoth museums and virtual museums go through a curation process for creating exhibitions, with a variety of methods available. These are often collaborative, requiring both cultural heritage professionals and designers or developers working together. Mixed reality has the potential to enhance this process for the developer and client, in the form of a collaborative mixed reality authoring tool. It is important to understand the process of collaborative development of cultural heritage applications so that the authoring tool could be designed to cater for these needs.In this paper, a user study is presented that analyses the process of delivering three cultural heritage projects by an experienced development company. As a result, a model that captures project stages and collaborative aspects with the clients is created and validated, existing bottlenecks are identified and three authoring tool concepts that could improve the process are generated and discussed. The resulting tool is proposed to aid the collaboration process during the prototype and initial design stages of the development process, which will aid future research.Item Building Heritage Material Passports (BHMPs): digitalisation of Made in Italy's Heritage techniques for more Resilient Communities(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Mazza, Arianna; Bernardo, Graziella; Guida, Antonella; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanThe whole of Italy is characterized by small towns at risk of complete depopulation with a widespread and remarkable cultural heritage. These places, still little known and valued, are the testimony of the unique way of living and inhabiting the places belonging to the multifaceted wealth of Made in Italy. The work focuses on the knowledge and rediscovery of local materials and construction techniques using digital tools as a driver of sustainable development and resilience of small communities according to new models of the circular economy. The paper presents some preliminary results of research activities aimed at developing a proof-of-concept of Building Heritage Materials Passport (BHMPs) for the case study of the incannucciata construction technique found in the Rabatana, the ancient Arab district of the little town of Tursi in the Province of Matera (Basilicata, Italy).Item Enriching Medieval 4D Models with Interactive Narratives(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Andujar, Carlos; Cayuela, Begoña; Lorés Otzet, Immaculada; Bosch, Carles; Guardia, Milagros; Munoz-Pandiella, Imanol; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanDigital technologies are increasingly used in cultural heritage preservation and dissemination, but some monuments pose significant challenges due to substantial historical architectural and pictorial changes. This paper introduces a method to enrich multi-layered, multi-phase 3D models of cultural heritage with art history knowledge. This is achieved through imagebased annotations, interactive narratives, points of interest, text, and audio, creating guided tours of the monument's historical phases. The approach is user-friendly for art historians, requiring no programming skills for defining such elements. A pilot user evaluation demonstrated its effectiveness in enhancing visitor engagement and understanding, and allowed improving the final web-based application and narratives.Item Reconstructing Lost Altarpieces: A Differentiable Rendering Approach(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Pagès-Vilà, Anna; Munoz-Pandiella, Imanol; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanStudying works that have completely or partially disappeared is always difficult due to the lack of information. In more fortunate scenarios where photographs were taken before the destruction, the study of the piece is limited by the viewpoints captured in the available photographs. In this interdisciplinary research, we present a new methodology for reconstructing lost altarpieces from a single historical image, utilizing differentiable rendering techniques. We test our methodology by reconstructing some reliefs from the altarpiece of Sant Joan Baptista (Valls, Spain), which was destroyed in 1936. These results are valuable for both experts and the public, as they facilitate a better understanding of the relief's volumetrics and their spatial relationships, representing a significant advancement in the virtual recovery of lost artifacts.Item SemanticSplatStylization: Semantic scene stylization based on 3D Gaussian splatting and class-based style transfer(The Eurographics Association, 2024) Sinha, Saptarshi Neil; Graf, Holger; Weinmann, Michael; Corsini, Massimiliano; Ferdani, Daniele; Kuijper, Arjan; Kutlu, HasanWe propose a novel approach for 3D Semantic Style Transfer in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that applies style transfer to specific segments of a 3D scene using 2D style images. Our method leverages a finetuning of 3D Gaussian splats and fast 2D class-based style transfer to achieve targeted stylization with superior fidelity and multi-view consistency compared to existing state-of-the- art methods. By incorporating a semantic understanding, our approach ensures precise, context-aware stylization, aligning the visual characteristics of segments with their intended style. The application of 3D Semantic Style Transfer in cultural heritage preservation and restoration holds significant potential. By accurately capturing and transferring styles onto specific segments of cultural heritage objects, our approach demonstrates the potential of providing more accurate and visually appealing stylization results that preserve the integrity and historical significance of cultural heritage artifacts.