Procedural Modeling for Digital Cultural Heritage

Abstract

The rapid development of computer graphics and imaging provides the modern archeologist with several tools to realistically model and visualize archeological sites in 3D. This, however, creates a tension between veridical and realistic modeling. Visually compelling models may lead people to falsely believe that there exists very precise knowledge about the past appearance of a site. In order to make the underlying uncertainty visible, it has been proposed to encode this uncertainty with different levels of transparency in the rendering, or of decoloration of the textures. We argue that procedural modeling technology based on shape grammars provides an interesting alternative to such measures, as they tend to spoil the experience for the observer. Both its efficiency and compactness make procedural modeling a tool to produce multiple models, which together sample the space of possibilities. Variations between the different models express levels of uncertainty implicitly, while letting each individual model keeping its realistic appearance. The underlying, structural description makes the uncertainty explicit. Additionally, procedural modeling also yields the flexibility to incorporate changes as knowledge of an archeological site gets refined. Annotations explaining modeling decisions can be included. We demonstrate our procedural modeling implementation with several recent examples.

Virtual Reconstruction of Lost Architectures: From the TLS Survey to Ar Visualization

“…Besides, in (Moitinho & Barcelò, 2012) the use of 3D digital model and reverse engineering process were used to obtain significant data of archaeological evidences. When dealing with virtual visualization techniques for the valorisation of archaeological landscape and heritage, it is mandatory to refer to the main Charters at international level: the London Charter (Haegler, et al, 2009) and the Seville Charter. The first one was conceived to enhance the rigour with which computer-based visualisation methods and outcomes are used and evaluated in heritage contexts, thereby promoting understanding and recognition of such methods and outcomes.…”

A Survey of Algorithmic Shapes

“…Any change of the geometry can cause the referenced part of the model to no longer exist or be changed. Nevertheless, there are many examples for semantic modeling in various contexts [70][71][72][73][74][75].…”

Procedural modeling historical buildings for serious games

“…However, providing accurate model reconstruction is a challenge since available data is limited and sometimes, even non-existing. Many works have been proposed to solve related aspect, like recreating the city structure [5], or generation of building envelopes, or facade composition [3]. A complete state of the art overview that contains the most relevant literature of all these topics can be found in the work by Musialski et al [2].…”

“…Haegler and coauthors [3], explored procedural modeling to keep uncertainty as a source of realistic reconstruction. The way this uncertainty was modeled in their system was through probabilistic rules.…”