“Image-Based Empirical Information Acquisition, Scientific Reliability, and Long-Term Digital Preservation for the Natural Sciences and Cultural Heritage”

About This Publication

Authors	Mark Mudge, Tom Malzbender, Alan Chalmers, Roberto Scopigno, James Davis, Oliver Wang, Prabath Gunawardane, Michael Ashley, Martin Doerr, Alberto Proenca, João Barbosa
Presented at	Eurographics 2008
Date and Location	April 14-18, 2008, Crete, Greece
Full-day tutorial	Presented by the authors
PDF file of tutorial notes	Download (3.5 MB)
PDF file of the original proposal and related information	Download (102 KB)

Abstract

The tools and standards of best practice adopted by natural science (NS) and cultural heritage (CH) professionals will determine the digital future of NS and CH digital imaging work. This tutorial discusses emerging digital technologies and explores issues influencing widespread adoption of digital practices for NS and CH. The tutorial explores a possible digital future for NS and CH through key concepts; adoption of digital surrogates, empirical (scientific) provenance, perpetual digital conservation, and “born archival” semantic knowledge management. The tutorial discusses multiple image-based technologies along with current research including: Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), Photometric Stereo, and new research in the next generation of multiview RTI. This research involves extending stereo correspondence methods. These technologies permit generation of digital surrogates that can serve as trusted representations of “real-world” content. The tutorial explores how empirical provenance contributes to the reliability of digital surrogates, and how perpetual digital conservation can ensure that digital surrogates will be archived and available for future generations.

The tutorial also investigates the role of semantically based knowledge management strategies and their use in simplifying ease of use by natural science and CH professionals, as well as long term preservation activities. The tutorial further investigates these emerging technologies’ potential to democratize digital technology, making digital tools and methods easy to adopt and make NS and CH materials widely available to diverse audiences. The tutorial concludes with hands-on demonstrations of image-based capture and processing methods and a practical problem-solving set of questions and answers with the audience.