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TOC | What CHI Does | The Big Picture | Mission | Contact | Bios | Acknowledgements
THE BIG PICTURE
Digital Imaging and Cultural Heritage in Context
The digital future of cultural heritage work will be determined by the tools and standards of best practice that are adopted by cultural heritage professionals. CHI explores issues that influence these adoption decisions and showcases examples of emerging digital technologies designed to overcome current obstacles.
CHI works alongside experts from leading industry and research organizations to deliver collaborative solutions and advanced digital imaging techniques to cultural heritage professionals worldwide. CHI and its collaborators design, test, and evaluate cost-effective, easy-to-use tools to digitally capture raw empirical data from a wide variety of cultural heritage materials, both ancient and modern.
Through mathematical processing, the raw data yields robust three-dimensional (3D) virtual representations and discloses object details not visible with conventional methods. These enhanced images, viewing methods, and data collection techniques present a revolutionary new approach to cultural heritage documentation.
Research Breakthroughs in Digital Imaging
Recent research breakthroughs in computer graphics, robotics, and machine vision have converged to make a new generation of robust digital tools for cultural heritage possible. This computer imaging technology must be both adapted to and adopted by the cultural heritage community.
CHI fosters the emergence of an ensemble of new digital tools and methods that can build the digital album of humanity’s cultural family in essentially the same ways that people today build the digital albums of their own families’ births, graduations, and marriages. The cultural heritage workers who build, preserve, and open the album for all of us to see must be able to use these new standards of best practice themselves. They also need to do all of this without much money.
CHI challenges the premise that there must be a separate class of technology-savvy digital documentation “providers” who serve the documentary needs of professional cultural heritage “consumers.”
Transcending Limitations
Today’s cultural heritage documentation and management practices frequently rely on hand-drawn graphics and conventional, including digital, photographs, all of which have severe limitations. Among the most significant drawbacks involve the editorial decisions of the draftsperson or photographer to record some elements of the empirical data presented by the subject and exclude others. This is obvious in drawing and is present in photography because of illumination choices in image composition.
CHI seeks to transcend the limitations of conventional documentation methods by incorporating new technologies into the process. For the first time in history, people are digitally archiving their past. Great quantities of scarce resources are being allocated to this effort. CHI wants to ensure that, when humanity’s digital album is opened, people will find not only words, photographs, and videos, but also interactive multi-angle viewing of objects in three dimensions.
The way people experience these virtual cultural heritage objects can be natural and fundamentally similar to experiencing physical objects. It should be possible to rotate the virtual representations in any direction, zoom in or out at any point, and change the light source position as one might do by moving a lamp.
We need to expand the abilities we possess today to enhance the digital representations to disclose information difficult to discern even by direct examination of the original physical object. Digital objects must faithfully represent the real-world objects. We need to trust that the virtual cultural heritage we see is authentic. But more importantly, when we open humanity’s digital album, we need to trust that our virtual cultural heritage will be there.
Finding the Best Tools
CHI’s evaluation of emerging technologies is completely pragmatic. We are looking for the tools that do the best job for cultural heritage professionals. In the visual realm, we want to use information-capture methods that are based on digital photography because those skills are already widespread.
It is important to us that the tools we build can be adopted by cultural heritage workers with very little additional training. For widespread cultural heritage adoption of new best practices to happen, the tools will need to be compatible with existing skill sets and working cultures.
CHI looks for methods where it is possible to automatically process the raw photos. The entire image processing pipeline, all the way to the final virtual representation, must be automated. We don’t want cultural heritage people to need help from digital imaging experts.
Widespread Acceptance
CHI’s discussions with numerous cultural heritage professionals reveal that confidence and trust in the scientific reliability of digital representations are preconditions for adoption of the associated digital technology. For digital representations to be adopted into regular cultural heritage work practice, they must be seen as trustworthy data.
Widespread adoption of digital virtual representations requires a practical way to evaluate the quality of individual digital representations. For a scholar to use a digital representation, built by someone else, in their own work, they need to determine if they can trust its authenticity. Scholars need to know that what’s represented in a virtual object is what’s on the physical original.
For example, if archeologists are relying on virtual 3D models to study Paleolithic stone tools, they must be able to judge the likelihood that a feature on the model will also be on the original and vice versa. If they can’t trust that it’s an authentic representation, they won’t use it.
Trusted Digital Images and Data
The experience of those engaged in distributed, Internet-based scientific inquiry confirms the necessity of documenting how digitally represented information is generated. These collaborations, found frequently in the biological sciences, rely heavily on process accounts of digital data creation to assess the quality of information contributed by the cooperating partners and make their own work valuable to others.
“Empirical provenance” records the journey of original, unaltered empirical evidence from its initial data capture all the way through the image generation process pipeline to its final digital representation. Empirical provenance gives an account of the process history employed to generate digital virtual representations of our world.
Just as “real-world” cultural material requires a provenance identifying what it is, establishing its ownership history, and proving its authenticity, digital representations require an empirical provenance to document the imaging practices employed to create it. By evaluating empirical provenance information, users can assess the quality and trustworthiness of a digital image.
CHI’s solution for creating trusted digital representations through empirical provenance has two parts. First, we maintain access to the original empirical data — the raw photographs. Second, because the raw photos are processed into robust digital objects automatically, we can also automatically archive what is done at each step of the way.
Global Solution
Empirical provenance gives everyone the ability to access both the original image data and the complete process history, to track and reconfirm the quality and authenticity of the data. Users can then decide on their own whether to trust the virtual representation or not.
The International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the UNESCO-supported International Council of Museums (ICOM) working group is now in the process of mapping CHI’s empirical provenance into their Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), International Standards Organization (ISO) standard 21127. The CIDOC CRM promotes shared understanding for multi-disciplinary museum and library collections. It does this by providing a common framework to which information can be mapped. This framework enables robust semantic queries and is compatible with existing databases.
CHI also develops or discovers related digital communication tools, especially designed for use with virtual cultural heritage material, to enable location-independent scholarship, conservation/preservation activities, and public access. We want these tools to have long-term sustainability, and be integrated into new standards of best practice crafted for the digital age.
Finally, the solutions CHI finds must be made freely available to the cultural heritage community. Emerging solutions that are compatible with these goals are being refined by CHI and other researchers. For more information on these advanced technologies, see the Technology section.
With a new generation of affordable, easy to use, tools producing trustworthy digital representations, we will finally witness widespread adoption of digital tools in cultural heritage.
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Bas Relief,
Tomb of Kha Em Het
West Bank, Luxor, Egypt
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