Massive 3D Digitization of Museum Contents

The goal of the 3D-ICONS European Project is to provide EUROPEANA ( www.europeana.eu ) with accurate 3D models of architectural and archaeological monuments and buildings of remarkable cultural importance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the specific processing pipeline that has been set for digitizing a significant part of the Civic Archaeological Museum in Milan (Italy). All the technical and logistic aspects needed for capturing 3D models in a Museum environment, the implication with IPR, and the metadata acquisition, are covered. The main issue is generating a good result by the technical point of view, minimizing the impact on the usual Museum activity during the 3D capturing operations, shortening in the meantime the processing time to the minimal allowed by the different applicable techniques. This condition has led different choices related to the survey technologies (laser scanning and image based modeling) and the related data processing. Both technical and descriptive metadata have been collected for each item acquired, for generating a record of data searchable on EUROPEANA, with the addition of new metadata not defined in the minimal record, for making traceable the path leading to the generated digital content. The paper gives a general discussion of such issues with some specific examples referred to the large set of 3D objects digitized within the 3D-ICONS project.