The 3D-digitisation of precious cultural heritage artifacts is highly important for historical preservation purposes. Doing so can help mitigate against events such as tourism damage, natural disasters, and war. It also enables access to three-dimensional data for researchers of
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The 3D-digitisation of precious cultural heritage artifacts is highly important for historical preservation purposes. Doing so can help mitigate against events such as tourism damage, natural disasters, and war. It also enables access to three-dimensional data for researchers of all disciplines all around the globe to study these artifacts at the same time. Furthermore, future generations can benefit from an online database of archaeological artifacts for educational purposes. Several high-end solutions are available. However, the cost to purchase or leasing can be too substantial for heritage institutions that often run on small budgets. Therefore, there is a need for cost-effective solutions to create high-quality 3D-images of archaeological artifacts. This thesis focuses on the 3D-imaging of small archaeological artifacts. When creating 3D-images of the artifacts, it is important to capture the texture details and preserve color information correctly. An extensive literature study was done on the existing 3D-imaging technologies and systems. It was concluded that photogrammetry is the most suitable technology available to create 3D-images of small archaeological artifacts. Photogrammetric systems have been studied for their ability to create high-quality 3D-images. Literature states that the quality of the 3D-images created with photogrammetric 3D-imaging systems suffers from a small depth of field. By the nature of optics, this small depth of field occurs when photographing an object from a close distance. This thesis provides the design and validation of a cost-effective photogrammetric 3D-imaging system for small archaeological artifacts. This system is optimized for the depth of field and is able to successfully create high-quality 3D-images with highly detailed textures and color information. This design overcomes the small depth of field limitations by implementing focus stacking. The system's most intensive task, the acquisition of photographs, has been automated, and a working compact system has been created.
