Region based fusion of 3D and 2D visual data for Cultural Heritage objects

A workflow is proposed for Cultural Heritage applications in which the fusion of 3D and 2D visual data is required. Using data acquired by cheap, standard devices, like a 3D scanner having a low quality 2D camera in it, and a high resolution DSLR camera, one can produce high quality color calibrated 3D model for documenting purpose. The proposed processing workflow combines a novel region based calibration method with an ICP alignment used for refining the results. It works on 3D data, that do not necessarily contain intensity information in them, and 2D images of a calibrated camera. These can be acquired with commercial 3D scanners and color cameras without any special constraint. In contrast with the typical solutions, the proposed method is not using any calibration patterns or markers. The efficiency and robustness of the proposed calibration method has been confirmed on both synthetic and real data.