An interactive Tunisian virtual museum through affine reconstruction of gigantic mosaics and antic 3-D models

Abstract

Museums are no longer static depositories for objects, as they used to be for the past two centuries. Online and interactive access has created new opportunities for museums and cultural institutions to reach out and discover new audiences for promotion of cultural achievements. The virtual tours and the panorama reconstructions become among the most popular solutions for virtual consultation of historical monuments. A Tunisian virtual museum application aims to make its relative monuments more accessible to experts such as archaeologist or art historians, and even to the large public. In this research, we intend to present an invariant based approaches for the reconstruction of both mosaic panorama and 3D models. We propose a framework to create a Tunisian virtual museum and we focused on an interactive application related to Bardo museum. We apply affine invariance in a finite set of viewpoints to compute shape descriptors with completeness and stability properties. Such affine invariants serve to refine 3D model generated by classic shape-from-silhouette algorithm and to assist the creation of panorama image mosaics from uncalibrated images.