Anestis Koutsoudis

• BSc, MSc, PhD Computer Science
• Research Director at Athena Research and Innovation Center In Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies

Haptic contact is usually prohibited when exploring cultural heritage content. This inevitably results in an incomplete experience for the visually impaired as tactile exploration is the dominant substitute of sight. In this paper, we focus on Information and Communication Technologies utilisation to enable cultural heritage content to become more...

The sunken city of old Epidaurus is one of the most significant archaeological sea-sites on the east coast of Peloponnese, Greece. Remains of ancient buildings are preserved in the area with a Roman villa located about 50m from the coast, the most notable of them. The site is attracting tourists and researchers from various scientific domains, such...

Haptic prohibition is one of the most common limitations when interacting with museum artefacts. This restriction aims quite logically at preventing damages while safeguarding the integrity of the cultural reserve, which is primarily characterised by its uniqueness. Nevertheless, in cases where museum visitors are visually impaired, the inability t...

Disaster risk management of movable and immovable cultural heritage is a highly significant research topic. In this work, we present a pipeline for 3D digitisation, segmentation and annotation of large scale urban areas in order to produce data that can be exploited in disaster management simulators (e.g fire spreading, crowd movement, firefighting...

ESTIA is a research and innovation project that aspires to develop a comprehensive platform allowing the forecast, detection and management of incidents that are related with the risk of structural fires within Cultural Heritage (CH) settlements and sites. ESTIA aims to (a) enhance the management and preservation of CH, (b) limit the risks of fire...

Exploiting extended reality technologies in laboratory training enhances both teaching and learning experiences. It complements the existing traditional learning/teaching methods related to science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. In this work, we use extended reality technologies to create an interactive learning environment with dy...

This article focuses on important factors in the creation of enhanced personalised experiences in virtual environments for cultural heritage applications, especially those targeting virtual museums and exhibitions. Some of the most important factors relating to personalised virtual museums that relate to intelligent content and user modelling in vi...

One of the most challenging problems in the simulation of real environments is to generate worlds that appear realistic and more attractive. It becomes increasingly challenging when the simulated environment focuses on minors (students), because the young generation has high demands on simulation systems due to their experience in computer gaming....

One of the most challenging tasks in cross reality environment simulations is the generation of realistic and attractive worlds. The continuous evolution of computer game industry has a dramatic effect on such tasks as younger generations have higher expectations and demands in terms of realism. Virtual, Augmented, and mixed reality-based museums a...

Numerous software solutions implementing the structure-from-motion/multi-view stereo (SFM/MVS) 3D reconstruction approach have been made available over the last two decades. Hence, enabling the production of high quality, in terms of geometry and colour information, 3D objects using solely unordered image sequences depicting a static scene or objec...

The on-demand content enrichment of an exhibition center visit is an active applied research domain. This work focuses on the exploitation of mobile devices as an efficient medium to deliver information related to an exhibit or an area within the exhibition center by utilizing machine learning approaches. We present YPOPSEI, an integrated system th...

Machine learning is constantly proving its capabilities by achieving exceptional results in recognition and classification tasks. Image content recognition has been addressed by Bags of Visual Words coupled with a classification algorithm as well as convolutional neural networks. In this work, we question the applicability of these approaches indiv...

The fragmentary nature of pottery is considered a common place. Conservators are requested to apply a proper restoration solution by taking under consideration a wide range of morphological features and physicochemical properties that derive from the artefact itself. In this work, the authors discuss on a low-cost pottery-oriented restoration pipel...

Performance evaluation is one of the main research topics in information retrieval. Evaluation metrics in combination with benchmark datasets (groundtruth) are used to quantify various performance aspects of a retrieval algorithm. In this paper, we present the Orion Pottery Repository, a publicly available and domain specific benchmark database. It...

In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objects having been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and st...

This article focuses on important factors in the creation of enhanced personalised experiences in virtual environments for cultural heritage applications, especially those targeting virtual museums and exhibitions. Some of the most important factors relating to personalised virtual museums that relate to intelligent content and user modelling in vi...

For Digital Cultural Heritage, 3D modeling is an essential practice for the identification, monitoring, conservation, restoration, and enhancement of archaeological objects from artifacts to monuments. In this context 3D computer graphics can support archaeology and heritage policy, offering scholars a “sixth sense” for the understanding of the pas...

In this unique collection the authors present a wide range of interdisciplinary methods to study, document, and conserve material cultural heritage. The methods used serve as exemplars of best practice with a wide variety of cultural heritage objects having been recorded, examined, and visualised. The objects range in date, scale, materials, and st...

This paper focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence methods in multi-agent virtual environments for cultural heritage applications and especially virtual museums and exhibitions. Multi-agent systems are considered here as being autonomous social organizations capable of developing dynamic personalized virtual environments. In this resp...

The 3D digitisation of small artefacts is a very complicated procedure because of their complex morphological feature structures, concavities, rich decorations, high frequency of colour changes in texture, increased accuracy requirements etc. Image-based methods present a low cost, fast and effective alternative because laser scanning does not meet...

Numerous software solutions that implement the Structure-from-Motion/Multi-View Stereo (SfM/MVS) 3D reconstruction approach have been made available during the last decade. These allow the production of high quality in terms of geometry and colour information 3D models with the use of unordered image collections that depict a static scene or object...

Performance evaluation is one of the main research topics in information retrieval. Evaluation metrics are used to quantify various performance aspects of a retrieval method. These metrics assist in identifying the optimum method for a specific retrieval challenge but also to allow its parameters finetuning in order to achieve a robust operation fo...

The Depth of Field (DoF) is a vital factor in photogrammetric applications. Its effect is in most cases pretty obvious especially when capturing small artefacts. It is very important to observe its behaviour as it affects the ability to capture all the details of an object. Focus stacking is a technique in computational photography, in which a set...

One of the most challenging problems in the simulation of real environments is to generate worlds that appear realistic and more attractive. It becomes increasingly challenging when the simulated environment focuses on minors (students), because the young generation has high demands on simulation systems due to their experience in computer gaming....

Digital media and learning initiatives for virtual collaborative environments are contributing to the definition of new (sub-)disciplines in archaeological and heritage sciences. New nomenclature and terminology is emerging such as cyber archaeology, cyber archaeometry, virtual worlds and augmented and immersive realities; and all of them are relat...

p class="VARAbstract">A key issue in the study of cultural assets is theiroften fragmentary condition. This causes serious problems and questions regarding theirstudy and presentation. Pottery fragments are the most numerous findings in every excavation. Furthermore, pottery plays an essential role for the reconstruction of the past, since it provi...

Digitalmedia and learning initiatives for virtual collaborative environments are contributing to the definition of new (sub-)disciplines in archaeological and heritage sciences. New nomenclature and terminology is emerging such as cyber archaeology, cyber archaeometry, virtual worlds and augmented and immersive realities; and all of them are relate...

Open linked data technologies pave the way towards the semantic Web of the future by a) exploiting the abundance in data availability, b) enhancing the continuing application developments in the Web and computer technologies, c) increasing the availability of game engines towards an expansion of techniques and d) bridging culture and education with...

he evolving technologies of the game engines and the Web have reached a level of maturity that enables them to contribute significantly to the long-celebrated blending of culture and education with gaming. In this work, we present DynaMus, an innovative fully dynamic Web-based virtual museum framework that relies entirely on users’ creativity and o...

The aim of this research is to achieve spatial consistency of the UV map. We present an approach to produce a fully spatially consistent UV mapping based on the planar parameterisation of the mesh. We apply our method on a 3D digital replica of an ancient Greek Lekythos vessel. We parameterise the mesh of a 3D model onto a unit square 2D plane usin...

Despite numerous recent efforts, 3D object retrieval based on partial shape queries remains a challenging problem, far from being solved. The problem can be defined as: given a partial view of a shape as query, retrieve all partially similar 3D models from a repository. The objective of this track is to evaluate the performance of partial 3D object...

Abstract—Continuous developments in the web and computer technologies along with an increasing availability of game engines contribute to an expansion of techniques that bridge culture and education with gaming. In addition, open linked data technologies pave the way towards the semantic web of the future by exploiting the abundance in data availab...

Abstract The continuous development of web services and computer infrastructures complemented by the increasing availability of game development software engines, contribute to an on-going expansion in the release of serious games (SG) in diverse areas, ranging from entertainment, cultural heritage (CH), education, artificial intelligence (AI),...

Abstract Technological innovations have rapidly increased over the recent years as well as e-learning usage and thus museums have increased e-learning investment in order to adapt their services in a better and more efficient way for their visitors. While museums offer a diverse range of personal digital collections systems on their websites it...

Performance benchmarking is an absolute necessity when attempting to objectively quantify the performance of content-based retrieval methods. For many years now, a number of plot-based and scalar-based measures in combination with benchmark datasets have already been used in order to provide objective results. In this work, we present the first ver...

The generation of 3D models with the Structure-from-Motion and Multiple View Stereovision (SFM-MVS) techniques is considered popular within the cultural heritage domain. The cost effectiveness in terms of hardware equipment and relatively low background knowledge requirements are two major SFM-MVS properties while the quality of the data produced c...

Web-based dissemination of cultural heritage 3D content has been vividly increased over the last decade. EU-funded research and development projects established affordable pipelines in order to allow efficient 3D documentation and dissemination. Such an example is the 3D-ICONS project that was focused on the 3D digitisation of outstanding cultural...

Web portals are entry points for information presentation and exchange over the Internet used by a community of interest. A part of the European cultural heritage thesaurus has already being offered as digital collections using various formats and thus there is a requirement for management, preservation and archiving of such digital assets as well...

One of the factors that determine the data quality produced by targetless photogrammetric techniques is the feature richness of the surface being captured. The Structure-From-Motion and Multiple View Stereovision (SFM-MVS) pipeline is no exception to this rule as it relies on the ability to identify corresponding points within a collection of unord...

In this paper, we present a method for partial matching and retrieval of 3D objects based on range image queries. The proposed methodology addresses the retrieval of complete 3D objects using range image queries that represent partial views. The core methodology relies upon Bag-of-Visual-Words modelling and enhanced Dense SIFT descriptor computed o...

3D digitisation has been applied in different application domains. Due to the continuous growing interest, commercial and experimental 3D acquisition systems have evolved. Nevertheless, there isn't an all-in-one solution, thus there is a need for combining different technologies in order to exploit the advantages of each approach. In this paper, we...

A number of software solutions based on the Structure-From-Motion (SFM) and Dense Multi-View 3D Reconstruction (DMVR) algorithms have been made recently available. They allow the production of high quality 3D models by using unordered image collections that depict a scene or an object from different viewpoints. In this work, we question the quality...

In the interdisciplinary domain of conservation science, a critical and selective eye is required in order to allow researchers to choose the most effective combination of analytical techniques for each project and, more importantly, to process and analyze the resulting volume of diverse data. The current essay attempts to combine a more traditiona...

The idea of enriching a cultural heritage visitor’s experience by employing mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is an active research domain. This is mainly due to the worldwide user penetration of such devices along with their continuous hardware performance enhancement. This work presents the experience and feedback gained by one year...

Nowadays, multi-image 3D reconstruction is an active research field and a number of commercial and free software tools have been already made available to the public. These provide methods for the 3D reconstruction of real world objects by matching feature points and retrieving depth information from a set of unordered digital images. This is achie...

3D digitisation denotes the process of describing parts of our physical world through finite measurements and representations that can be processed and visuali sed with a computer system. Reality-based 3D digitisation is essential for the documentation, conservation and preservation of our Cultural Heritage. This article composes a critical review...

The continuous evolution of 3D computer graphics and the progress of 3D digitization systems resulted in a continuous increase in the available 3D content. The widespread use of 3D objects in diverse domains contributed on forming 3D object retrieval as an active research field. In order to objectively evaluate the performance of retrieval methodol...

In this paper, a methodology for 3D object partial matching and retrieval based on range image queries is presented. The proposed methodology addresses the retrieval of complete 3D objects based on artificially created range image queries which represent partial views. The core methodology relies upon Dense SIFT descriptors computed on panoramic vi...

The ongoing evolution of the Internet has enabled web applications that use real time three-dimensional (3D) graphics and virtual environments. Moreover, in recent years, cultural technology has also flourished notably. Virtual museums represent one significant application that combines culture with modern technologies and the internet, requiring a...

It is fascinating to look at any digitization project from the scientific, technical and implementation points of view. However, it is necessary to consider the financial perspective as well. In this work we attempt to evaluate two common practices (photogrammetry and laser scanning) for the creation of 3D reconstructions of Cultural Heritage monum...

The evolution of real time 3D graphics technologies in combination with high bandwidth Internet connections and modern Web browsers enable users to explore complex 3D scenes. As a rule, a virtual visitor has to manually explore the geometrically complex 3D model in order to discover points of interest. This manual exploration is a time consuming pr...

The utilisation of 3D computer graphics technologies in the domain of pottery analysis can enhance archaeological research in terms of data management, indexing and shape matching. In this paper, we attempt to reduce the dimensions of the 3D vessel shape matching problem in order to create Web-enabled compact shape descriptors applicable for conten...

Shape matching is one of the main research procedures performed by archaeologists. Real time 3D computer graphics, 3D digitisation and content based retrieval are technologies that can facilitate the automation of the shape matching process. As pottery plays a significant role in understanding ancient societies, we focus on the development of compa...

a b s t r a c t This paper presents a novel compact shape descriptor designed specifically for content-based retrieval of complete or nearly complete 3D vessel replicas. The descriptor consists of two vectors that carry morphological features of the vessel's main body and appendages. The extraction of the descriptor is based on a pose normalisation...

The development of content based retrieval mechanisms is a very active research area. Present studies are mainly focused on automating the information extraction and indexing processes. Usually for the development and evaluation of such mechanisms, there is always a need for a ground-truth database. In this paper, we present a software tool named q...

Virtual reconstruction of urban areas, which are lost due to natural or man-provoked disasters, is nowadays feasible through the usage of contemporary three-dimensional technologies and virtual reality. With the aid of topography, architecture, history and archaeology, the once existed urban areas, or even whole cities, can be reconstructed as clos...

Nowadays commercial 3D range scanning systems have been used for the accurate digitisation of cultural heritage sites by following either terrestrial or aerial scanning approaches. Both approaches require high cost special equipment and software to cope with the vast amount of raw data. These raw data can be characterised as superfluous in cases wh...

The benchmarking of 3D content base retrieval mechanisms is usually performed on test bed datasets composed by 3D models. These usually cover several categories of objects such as ships, airplanes, animals, furniture, etc. In this paper, we attempted the generation of a ground truth database of 3D models that exhibit morphological characteristics s...

Continuity and relation to the past are inherent in human nature. The remains of the past constitute culture and cultural heritage. Preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage appear to be, nowadays, a universal priority. Historic/architectural monuments are among the most significant categories of cultural heritage and their 3D digitizatio...

Complete digital recording of Cultural Heritage is a multidimensional process. It depends highly on the nature of the subject of recording as well as the purpose of its recording. The whole process involves the three-dimensional digitization, digital data processing and storage, archival and management, representation and reproduction. In this pape...

The old city of Xanthi (Thrace-Greece) is one of the biggest traditional settlements in Greece which has the specialty to exhibit mixed traditional Greek, European and Oriental architectural features. This paper presents a 3D reconstruction of a small part of the settlement. It deals with the idea of using open source systems in 3D graphics in orde...

Recent developments in three-dimensional technologies and measurement instrumentation combined with multimedia databases offer today new possibilities for the integrated and complete description of Cultural Heritage Objects (CHO). In this work, we present an attempt to develop a database for archaeological ceramic and glass artifacts, where in addi...