Kevin Cain

INSIGHT (Institute for the Study and Integration of Graphical Heritage Techniques) · Research

This open tutorial is meant to help you use the software Splash to create projection installations. Here, we’ll use a projection calibration project led by Kevin Cain, created for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Splash is a free (GPL) tool for working with projectors, written and maintained by Emmanuel Durand and Jérémie Soria at Société des arts techno...

The colorful decoration of statues and buildings in antique times is commonly described by the term Antique Polychromy. It is well known among scholars but less so in the interested public and its exact form is subject of ongoing research. In this paper we discuss results obtained from the Frieze of the Siphnian Treasury from the Sanctuary of Delph...

In this paper we survey an open source data archive for Chichén Itzá. The archive contains 3D data, photographs and other field data gathered on site and at museums in the Yucatan, Mexico. In the first part of the paper we survey the data available in the archive, with special emphasis on point clouds obtained with laser scanners and digital models...

There is a precedent in the field of computer graphics for large cultural heritage projects to serve as an umbrella for important papers. Notably, the Digital Michaelangelo project led by Dr. Marc Levoy at Stanford University and the Parthenon, a project led by Dr. Paul Debevec at the University of Southern California, are recognized as landmark ef...

This course surveys several practical techniques advanced by graphics and vision researchers for applications in cultural heritage, archeology, and art history. Topics include: efficient techniques for digital capture of heritage objects, appropriate uses in the heritage field, an end-to-end pipeline for processing archeological reconstructions (wi...

Spatial capture remains an active topic in the SIGGRAPH literature, and many capture techniques have been applied in the field of cultural heritage in recent years. In many cases, the data produced at cultural heritage sites by computer graphics researchers represent a high-quality facsimile of the heritage objects under study. This fact has prompt...

Static panoramic photography has been shown to contribute to context-rich descriptions of regions under archaeological study. We show that fast traversal through a matrix of dynamic panoramas can allow users to quickly locate specific target features within a complex scene. Results are presented using two large archaeological monuments as a test su...

We describe a highly portable field technique for estimating surface normals, geometry and albedo from walls and other areas of archaeological sites using limited sets of digital photographs. Surface geometry and albedo are extracted from photometric calculations, yielding a complete model with estimated per-vertex colour. This technique is demonst...

The benefits of including virtual humans into cultural heritage reconstructions are twofold: the realism of architectural models is increased by populating them; and, as well, it allows to preserve the intangible heritage describing how people in historical times behaved. We present a case study, where we create an interactive real-time scenario of...

Here we present a new approach to archaeological reconstruction, in which we project digitally reconstructed iconography within a damaged Egyptian tomb. Combining video projection, computer animation, and digital compositing, a kind of 'plural space' is generated in the tomb's burial chamber; this work is designed to enable visitors to view element...

Here we consider optical triangulation scanning as a means of creating permanent architectural archives in the form of accurate ground plans and other orthographic views. We present plan drawings created with laser scan data and use these documents to make comparisons with existing documents. Finally, we present a new technique for decreasing the l...

Archaeological use of non-contact scanning has been successfully demonstrated for sites and objects [Levoy et al]. In this short paper, we consider the novel application of laser scanning to the field of archaeological epigraphy, the study of inscriptions.

During viewpoint framing for long-range laser scanning, nearly all current scan control software assumes a uniform bounding box selection (parametric UxV) within an XYZ world. Here we suggest a new system of scanner control that does not make this assumption, but instead uses active parsing of incoming points to enable automated, "subdivided" scan...

We present a new method to solve a 3D 'jigsaw puzzle', building a colossus from scans of its fragmentary ruins in Thebes, Egypt.

Ramsses II's large but damaged tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings is now being revived by a French team (CNRS). Current excavation and study is meant to culminate not only in the tomb's first complete publication, but also in the tomb's first public opening--two goals with very different needs. We ask: how best should they be served? A multi-layer...

In addition to the kinds of standard documentation that a 3D archive can provide for a site of cultural heritage, laser scan data can also be used as the basis for accurate ground plans and other orthographic views. The resulting plans can be used to draw comparisons with existing documents and are also readily usable by architects and engineers fo...