Roberto Scopigno

• Principal Investigator at Italian National Research Council

Scientific investigations of artworks are crucial in terms of preservation since they provide a measurable evaluation of the materials and the state of conservation. This is the case of Antonello da Messina’s painting “Ecce Homo”: its delicate state of conservation, with the need for constant monitoring, required a broad and in-depth diagnostic cam...

The Cultural Heritage (CH) domain is a field where many different visual media are constituent elements of the main activities: study, conservation, dissemination, and presentation to the public (museum visitors, tourists, practitioners). Those media are usually used in isolation, adopting specific visualization tools. This paper aims to present se...

3D scanning is an effective technology for dealing at different levels the state of conservation/deformation of a panel painting, from the micro-geometry of the craquelure to the macro-geometry of the supported used. Unfortunately, the current solutions used to analyze multiple 3D scans acquired over time are based on very controlled acquisition pr...

Relightable images have been widely used as a valuable tool in Cultural Heritage (CH) artifacts, including coins, bas-reliefs, paintings, and epigraphs. Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI), a commonly used type of relightable images, consists of a per-pixel function which encodes the reflection behavior, estimated from a set of digital photogra...

Terrestrial laser scanning campaigns provide an important means to document the 3D structure of historical sites. Unfortunately, the process of converting the 3D point clouds acquired by the laser scanner into a coherent and accurate 3D model has many stages and is not generally automated. In particular, the initial cleaning stage of the pipeline—i...

This White Paper is the result of the PARTHENOS Workshop held in Marseilles at MAP Lab. (France), February 25th-February 27th, 2019. During the organization of this workshop, we were all strongly affected by the premature death of Matteo Dellepiane. Matteo had participated in the first PARTHENOS workshop on 3D. He was an outstanding researcher whos...

We present a method for turning a flash selfie taken with a smartphone into a photograph as if it was taken in a studio setting with uniform lighting. Our method uses a convolutional neural network trained on a set of pairs of photographs acquired in an ad-hoc acquisition campaign. Each pair consists of one photograph of a subject’s face taken with...

Annotation support in interactive systems is often considered a simple task by the CG community, since it entails the apparently easy selection of a region and its connection with some information. The reality appears more complex. The scope of this paper is two‐fold: first, to review the status of this domain, discussing and characterizing several...

Visual sampling techniques represent a valuable resource for a rapid, non-invasive data acquisition for underwater monitoring purposes. Long-term monitoring projects usually requires the collection of large quantities of data, and the visual analysis of a human expert operator remains, in this context, a very time consuming task. It has been estima...

Close-Range Photogrammetry (CRP) and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) are two of the most used image-based techniques when documenting and analyzing Cultural Heritage (CH) objects. Nevertheless, their potential impact in supporting study and analysis of conservation status of CH assets is reduced as they remain mostly applied and analyzed s...

Animal forests enhance Mediterranean coralligenous habitat biodiversity and functioning. Their monitoring is paramount to assess the conservation status of the habitat and to plan restoration actions for addressing the Good Environmental Status as required by the EU legislation. Scuba diving investigations allow fine data collection up to -70 m but...

We present a method for turning a flash selfie taken with a smartphone into a photograph as if it was taken in a studio setting with uniform lighting. Our method uses a convolutional neural network trained on a set of pairs of photographs acquired in an ad-hoc acquisition campaign. Each pair consists of one photograph of a subject's face taken with...

Three-dimensional content is becoming an important component of the World Wide Web environment. From the advent of WebGL to the present, a wide number of solutions have been developed (including libraries, middleware, and applications), encouraging the establishment of 3D data as online media of practical use. The fast development of 3D technologie...

We present a novel approach to automatically recover, from a small set of partially overlapping spherical images, an indoor structure representation in terms of a 3D floor plan registered with a set of 3D environment maps. We introduce several improvements over previous approaches based on color and spatial reasoning exploiting Manhattan world prio...

3DHOP (3D Heritage On-line Presenter) has been released 4 years ago, as an open-source framework for the creation of interactive visualization of 3D content on the web, aimed at the CH field. Transforming a research tool into a software "product" usable by the heterogeneous CH community is not a simple task and requires a significant amount of reso...

Abstract—This paper presents our digital publishing process and its editing system developed for a specific use case – the scholarly digital edition of a set of Roman inscribed lead tags – but suited for analyzing a broad variety of text-bearing objects. This pipeline covers the spectrum of the activities from data acquisition of the visual aspects...

We present a vision-based approach to automatically recover the 3D existing-conditions information of an indoor structure, starting from a small set of overlapping spherical images. The recovered 3D model includes the as-built 3D room layout with the position of important functional elements located on room boundaries. We first recover the underlyi...

Relightable images have demonstrated to be a valuable tool for the study and the analysis of coins, bas-relief, paintings, and epigraphy in the Cultural Heritage (CH) field. Reflection Transformation Imaging (RTI) are the most diffuse type of relightable images. An RTI image consists in a per-pixel function which encodes the reflection behavior, es...

This study presents a practical method to estimate dimensions of Paramuricea clavata colonies using generic photographic datasets collected across wide areas. Paramuricea clavata is a non-rigid, tree-like octocoral; this morphology greatly affects the quality of the sea fans multi-view stereo matching reconstruction, resulting in hazy and incoheren...

Mobile devices have become progressively more attractive for solving environment sensing problems. Thanks to their multi-modal acquisition capabilities and their growing processing power, they can perform increasingly sophisticated computer vision and data fusion tasks. In this context, we summarize our recent advances in the acquisition and recons...

Restoration is becoming a quite complex process: a large number of internal and external variables co-exist and may impair it. Among these, the large number of professionals involved and the huge amount of documentation produced can heavily affect the quality of the intervention as well as the possibility to have systemic and informed interventions...

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives, and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades have become ever more collaborative, distributed, and data intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organization, analysis, and present...

Capturing surface appearance precisely is paramount for modeling realistic materials. Nevertheless, the spatially varying nature of most materials is difficult to measure. State-of-the-art methods often rely on complex apparatus and controlled environments, and even if they are able to acquire reliable SVBRDFs, the whole process usually takes a lon...

Digital technologies are now mature for producing high quality digital replicas of Cultural Heritage (CH) assets. The research results produced in the last decade ignited an impressive evolution and consolidation of the technologies for acquiring high-quality digital three-dimensional (3D) models, encompassing both geometry and color. What remains...

The evolution of digitization technologies (2D and 3D) and the consequent wide availability of digital representations of artworks has ignited a number of works aimed at providing tools and platforms for archival, visual presentation, and integration of all those media. This chapter reviews some available instruments, focusing first on the platform...

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades has become ever more collaborative, distributed and data-intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentatio...

We introduce a novel algorithm for obtaining High Dynamic Range (HDR) videos from Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos with varying shutter speed or ISO per frame. This capturing technique represents today one of the most popular HDR video acquisition methods, thanks to the availability and the low cost of the equipment required; i.e., an off-the-sh...

We summarize our recent advances in acquisition, reconstruction and exploration of indoor environments with the aid of mobile devices. Our methods enable casual users to quickly capture and recover multi-room structures coupled with their visual appearance, starting from panorama images generated with the built-in capabilities of modern mobile devi...

We present a technology to capture, reconstruct and explore multi-room indoor structures, starting from panorama images generated with the aid of commodity mobile devices. Our approach is motivated by the need for fast and effective systems to simplify indoor data acquisition, as required in many real-world cases where mapping the structure is more...

The correct understanding of the 3D shape is a crucial aspect to improve the 3D scanning process, especially in order to perform high quality and as complete as possible 3D acquisitions on the field. The paper proposes a new technique to enhance the visualization of raw scanning data based on the definition in device space of a Multi-View Ambient O...

The solid geometry of archaeological deposits is fundamental to the interpretation of their chronological sequence. However, such stratigraphic sequences are generally viewed as static two-dimensional diagrammatic representations which are difficult to manipulate or to relate to real layers. The ADS 3D Viewer is a web-based resource for the managem...

Online publishing of almost every type of 3D data has become a quasi-standard routine. Nevertheless, the integration in a web page of a single 3D model, or of a predefined restricted set of models, raises different issues compared to an efficient and effective integration of thousands of them in an online repository. In this case it is mandatory to...

Given a cross field over a triangulated surface we present a practical and robust method to compute a field aligned coarse quad layout over the surface. The method works directly on a triangle mesh without requiring any parametrization and it is based on a new technique for tracing field-coherent geodesic paths directly on a triangle mesh, and on a...

Using synthetic videos to present a 3D scene is a common requirement for architects, designers, engineers or Cultural Heritage professionals however it is usually time consuming and, in order to obtain high quality results, the support of a film maker/computer animation expert is necessary. We introduce an alternative approach that takes the 3D sce...

In this paper two approaches for the computation of the shape diameter function (SDF) on the GPU are outlined and compared. The SDF is a scalar function describing the local thickness of an object. It can be used for consistent mesh partitioning and skeletonization. In the first approach, we have reorganized the tracing of the rays to be well suite...

Despite being perceived as interchangeable when properly applied, close-range photogrammetry and range imaging have both their pros and limitations that can be overcome using suitable procedures. Even if the two techniques have been frequently cross-compared, critical analysis discussing all sub-phases of a complex digitization project are quite ra...

Despite being perceived as interchangeable when properly applied, close-range photogrammetry and range imaging have both their pros and limitations that can be overcome using suitable procedures. Even if the two techniques have been frequently cross-compared, critical analysis discussing all sub-phases of a complex digitization project are quite ra...

The Sant’Angelo cave church is an underground medieval Benedictine complex in the south of Italy, affected by serious structural and chemical degradation. In the context of a documentation campaign promoted by the local Superintendence and supported by the IPERIONCH.it project, we carried out an accurate 3D and photographic survey, and reconstructe...

Grid-shells are lightweight structures used to cover long spans with few load-bearing material, as they excel for lightness, elegance and transparency. In this paper we analyze the stability of hex-dominant free-form grid-shells, generated with the Statics Aware Voronoi Remeshing scheme introduced in Pietroni et al. (2015). This is a novel hex-domi...

This contribution presents a contribution aimed at designing services for visual media files, developed in the context of the EC INFRA project “ARIADNE”. In the first phase of the project we reviewed the status of visual media resources in the archaeology domain and discovered that one of the major weaknesses was the capability of publishing and sh...

This volume brings together presentations from two sessions organized for the XVII World UISPP Conference that was held from 1-7 September 2014 in Burgos (Spain). The sessions are: The scientific value of 3D archaeology, organised by Hans Kamermans, Chiara Piccoli and Roberto Scopigno, and Detecting the Landscape(s) – Remote Sensing Techniques fr...

The need for integration and sharing of data on ancient polychromies requires shared working methods and tools. This paper illustrates a first effort in the direction of testing the web-based Information System documentation for the Restoration of Yards (SICaR) of Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism (MiBACT). This test activity sugges...

The advent of low cost scanning devices and the improvement of multi-view stereo techniques have made the acquisition of 3D geometry ubiquitous. Data gathered from different devices, however, result in large variations in detail, scale, and coverage. Registration of such data is essential before visualizing, comparing and archiving them. However, s...

3D Heritage Online Presenter (3DHOP) è una piattaforma per integrare all’interno di pagine internet modelli 3D ad alta risoluzione, quali ad esempio quelli ottenuti per scansione 3D, progettata per far fronte alle specifiche esigenze del settore Cultural Heritage (CH). 3DHOP gestisce la complessità dei dati in ingresso mediante un motore di rappres...

Digital fabrication devices exploit basic technologies in order to create tangible reproductions of 3D digital models. Although current 3D printing pipelines still suffer from several restrictions, accuracy in reproduction has reached an excellent level. The manufacturing industry has been the main domain of 3D printing applications over the last d...

Detecting geometric changes between two 3D captures of the same location performed at different moments is a critical operation for all systems requiring a precise segmentation between change and no-change regions. Such application scenarios include 3D surface reconstruction, environment monitoring, natural events management and forensic science. U...

This paper discusses a case study on the use of augmented reality (AR) within the context of cultural heritage. We implemented an iOS app for markerless AR that will be exhibited at the MUST museum in Lecce, Italy. The app shows a rich 3D reconstruction of the Roman amphitheater, which is nowadays only partially visible. The use of state-of-the-art...

Greek and Roman marble artworks have been deeply studied from a typological and stylistic point of view, while there is still a limited knowledge on the pigments, dyes, binders and technical expedients used by Roman artists. In a renewed scientific interest towards the ancient polychromy (colour and gilding), a digital methodological and multidisci...

In this work, we will present the outcomes of the 3D diagnostic investigations carried out on the painting Alchemy by Jackson Pollock. Thanks to an accurate digitization and a careful processing, we were able to generate a very precise high-resolution 3D model that proved to be useful in different stages of the diagnostic and conservation campaign....

In this paper, we propose a novel method for accelerating the computation of geodesic distances over arbitrary manifold triangulated surfaces. The method is based on a preprocessing step where we build a data structure. This allows to store arbitrary complex distance metrics. We show that, by exploiting the precomputed data, the proposed method is...

In this paper, we propose VirtualTour. This is a virtual reality app for Apple iOS 8 (tablets, smartphones) supporting the easy and natural exploration of Cultural Heritage sites captured with 3D scanning technologies or modeled by artists. VirtualTour proposes a novel approach for exploring virtual sites by exploiting modern mobile devices (tablet...

3D Heritage Online Presenter (3DHOP) is a framework for the creation of advanced web-based visual presentations of high-resolution 3D content. 3DHOP has been designed to cope with the specific needs of the Cultural Heritage (CH) field. By using multiresolution encoding, it is able to efficiently stream high-resolution 3D models (such as the sampled...

We present a novel interactive framework for improving 3D reconstruction starting from incomplete or noisy results obtained through image-based reconstruction algorithms. The core idea is to enable the user to provide localized hints on the curvature of the surface, which are turned into constraints during an energy minimization reconstruction. To...

Digital reconstruction of ancient polychromy is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of archaeological and architectural heritage documentation. It has emerged as a result of new interest in the experimental archaeology and the technological development of computer graphic tools. Therefore, this article presents a project aimed at the scie...

We introduce a framework for the generation of polygonal gridshell architectural structures, whose topology is designed in order to excel in static performances. We start from the analysis of stress on the input surface and we use the resulting tensor field to induce an anisotropic nonEuclidean metric over it. This metric is derived by studying t...

We present a very fast and simple-to-implement algorithm for the automatic registration of a large number of range maps. The proposed algorithm exploits a compact and GPU-friendly descriptor specifically designed for the alignment of this type of data. This pairwise registration algorithm, which also includes a simple mechanism to avoid to get fals...

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in Old English and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While a complete text can be found in the 10th-century “Vercelli Book,” the poem is considerably older, and its oldest occurrence is carved (in runes) on the 7- to 8th-century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this article, we present the...

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in Old English and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While a complete text can be found in the 10th-century “Vercelli Book,” the poem is considerably older, and its oldest occurrence is carved (in runes) on the 7- to 8th-century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this article, we present the...

The remote visualization and navigation of 3D data directly inside the web browser is becoming a viable option, due to the recent efforts in standardizing the components for 3D rendering on the web platform. Nevertheless, handling complex models may be a challenge, especially when a more generic solution is needed to handle different cases. In part...

Splat-based models are good representations because they do not rely on topological information, thereby making complex modeling operations easier, while keeping the same approximation ratio delivered by triangular meshes. However, splat-based models are problematic when dealing with edges and corners, because, near those sharp features, splats nee...

Current digital painting tools are primarily targeted at professionals and are often overwhelmingly complex for use by novices. At the same time, simpler tools may not invoke the user creatively, or are limited to plain styles that lack visual sophistication. There are many people who are not art professionals, yet would like to partake in digital...

Physically based renderers produce high quality images with high dynamic range (HDR) values. Therefore, these images need to be tone mapped in order to be displayed on low dynamic range (LDR) displays. A typical approach is to blindly apply tone mapping operators without taking advantage of the extra information that comes for free from the modelin...

We introduce a framework for the generation of grid-shell structures that is based on Voronoi diagrams and allows us to design tessellations that achieve excellent static performances. We start from an analysis of stress on the input surface and we use the resulting tensor field to induce an anisotropic non-Euclidean metric over it. Then we compute...

In this paper, we report a multidisciplinary approach for the analytic study and the reconstruction of the ancient colour used for Roman sarcophagi. For this purpose, we adopted the three-dimensional (3D) digital technology and found it to be a valuable tool for the identification, documentation and reconstruction of the ancient colour. This techno...

We introduce a novel efficient technique for automatically transforming a generic renderable 3D scene into a simple graph representation named ExploreMaps, where nodes are nicely placed point of views, called probes, and arcs are smooth paths between neighboring probes. Each probe is associated with a panoramic image enriched with preferred viewing...

The deployment of 3D content on the Web gained momentum in many contexts. The Cultural Heritage field is a good example, since 3D data need to be published on the Web for many different purposes (presenting museum collections, displaying virtual reconstruction of ancient sites, showing connections between artefacts of interest, etc.); moreover, 3D...

This paper presents the k-Optimum Path Forest (k-OPF) supervised classifier, which is a natural extension of the OPF classifier. k-OPF is compared to the k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Decision Tree (DT) classifiers, and ...

The interactive visualization of 3D content on the Web has gained momentum in recent years, thanks to the release of ad-hoc technology as part of HTML5. However, so far, few products fully exploit this opportunity for the easy and quick embedding of high-resolution 3D models in a Web page. 3DHOP (3D Heritage Online Presenter) is an advanced solutio...

Mesh joinery is an innovative method to produce illustrative shape approximations suitable for fabrication. Mesh joinery is capable of producing complex fabricable structures in an efficient and visually pleasing manner. We represent an input geometry as a set of planar pieces arranged to compose a rigid structure, by exploiting an efficient slit m...

Exact order-independent transparency (OIT) rendering is memory demanding because it requires per-pixel blending of an unknown number of fragments that need to be stored and sorted before compositing. In this paper, we describe the Dynamic Fragment Buffer ...

In this paper, we present EnvyDepth, an interface for recovering local illumination from a single HDR environment map. In EnvyDepth, the user quickly indicates strokes to mark regions of the environment map that should be grouped together in a single geometric primitive. From these annotated strokes, EnvyDepth uses edit propagation to create a deta...

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature, and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While its complete text can be found in the 10th Century ”Vercelli Book”, the poem is considerably older, and its oldest occurrence is carved (in runes) on the 7-8th Century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this...

We propose a computer-assisted constraint-based methodology for virtual reassembly of Cultural Heritage (CH) artworks. Instead than focusing on automatic, unassisted reassembly, we targeted the scenarios where the reconstruction process is not be based on shape properties only but it is build over the experience and intuition of a CH expert. Our pu...