From the digitization of cultural artifacts to the web publishing of digital 3D collections: an automatic pipeline for knowledge sharing

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach intended to simplify the production of multimedia content from real objects for the purpose of knowledge sharing, which is particularly appropriate to the cultural heritage field. It consists in a pipeline that covers all steps from the digitization of the objects up to the Web publishing of the resulting digital copies. During a first stage, the digitization is performed by a high speed 3D scanner that recovers the object's geometry. A second stage then extracts from the recovered data a color texture as well as a texture of details, in order to enrich the acquired geometry in a more realistic way. Finally, a third stage converts these data so that they are compatible with the recent WebGL paradigm, then providing 3D multimedia content directly exploitable by end-users by means of standard Internet browsers. The pipeline design is centered on automation and speed, so that it can be used by non expert users to produce multimedia content from potentially large object's collections, like it may be the case in cultural heritage. The choice of a high speed scanner is particularly adapted for such a design, since this kind of devices has the advantage of being fast and intuitive. Processing stages that follow the digitization are both completely automatic and ``seamless'', in the sense that it is not incumbent upon the user to perform tasks manually, nor to use external softwares that generally need additional operations to solve compatibility issues.