The Digital Michelangelo Project: 3D Scanning of Large Statues

Marc Levoy, Kari Pulli, Brian Curless, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, David Koller, Lucas Pereira, Matt Ginzton, Sean Anderson, James Davis, Jeremy Ginsberg, Jonathan Shade, Duane Fulk

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

56 Scopus citations

Abstract

We describe a hardware and software system for digitizing the shape and color of large fragile objects under non-laboratory conditions. Our system employs laser triangulation rangefinders, laser time-of-flight rangefinders, digital still cameras, and a suite of software for acquiring, aligning, merging, and viewing scanned data. As a demonstration of this system, we digitized 10 statues by Michelangelo, including the well-known figure of David, two building interiors, and all 1,163 extant fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, a giant marble map of ancient Rome. Our largest single dataset is of the David - 2 billion polygons and 7,000 color images. In this paper, we discuss the challenges we faced in building this system, the solutions we employed, and the lessons we learned. We focus in particular on the unusual design of our laser triangulation scanner and on the algorithms and software we developed for handling very large scanned models.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGGRAPH 2000 - Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages131-144
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)1581132085, 9781581132083
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 1 2000
Externally publishedYes
Event27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 2000 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Jul 23 2000Jul 28 2000

Publication series

NameSIGGRAPH 2000 - Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

Conference

Conference27th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 2000
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period7/23/007/28/00

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Keywords

  • 3D scanning
  • cultural heritage
  • graphics systems
  • mesh generation
  • range images
  • rangefinding
  • reflectance and shading models
  • sensor fusion

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