TERAPOINTS - High Quality Visualization and Interaction with Gigantic Point Data Sets

• Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW): Norbert Zimmermann
• Imagination Computer Services GmbH

Laser scanning is an important tool in cultural heritage for documenting the state of archaeological monuments. The data produced by laser scanning is ever increasing, with the latest generation of laser scanners generating a billion of points in one measurement pass. To colorize the laser scans, additional photographs are taken. Managing these huge amounts of data in terms of size is a challenge on its own, but also to ensure the quality of the resulting point-based models is of utmost importance for the further development of laser scanning as a standard technique in cultural heritage. We identified three topics that can drive forward the integration of laser scanning in the everyday work of archaeologists.

The first topic is the recoloring of point clouds that are combined from several different scan positions. The photographs taken at the different scan positions all exhibit different colorizations of the objects in the scene, as the lighting conditions usually vary from scan position to scan position. We want to develop methods that can provide an artifact free colorized model, independent of the lighting conditions that prevailed during laser scanning. The second topic deals with the management of large point clouds. It incorporates compression of the point cloud data, where the data shall nevertheless remain editable, and the display of large data. Several compression techniques for different point attributes, lossless as well as lossy compression, and fitting points to higher order primitives will be used for compression depending on the further use of the data. To display the data, an eye-tracker can be used to increase the visual experience of the user. The third topic deals with the distribution of data over a network, and navigating through the data, so that users can get access to large point-based models of cultural heritage sites with intuitive navigation capabilities.

Cultural Heritage is a growing market that needs intensive support from enabling technologies like real-time computer graphics and 3D object reconstruction. Especially the preservation and presentation of archaeological or historical items (architecture, artifacts) are of high importance there. Austria is well known in the tourism industry because of its cultural values. Preserving and presenting such cultural values not only physically but also in digital form, will help to distribute these values also using new media channels to the broad public. Any improvement of the technology that helps to preserve cultural items and allows presenting such items and scientific findings to a large audience will improve the value of these cultural items and in the same way boost the tourism industry.

Especially in Austria there is a huge "creative industries" community, small and medium companies working on innovative presentations of cultural goods. Especially these companies will profit from the technology that will be developed in this project. One of these "creative industries" companies is Imagination, partner in this project and pioneer in cultural heritage presentations and preservation software.