Digital tools for documenting and conserving Bahrain's built heritage for posterity

Documenting the physical characteristics of historic structures is the first step for any preventive maintenance, monitoring, conservation, planning and promotion action. Metric documentation supports informative decision-making process for property owners, site managers, public officials, and conservators. This information serves also a broader purpose, over time, it becomes the primary means by which scholars, heritage professionals, and the general public understand a site that radically changed or disappeared. Further, documentation supports monitoring as well as the character-defining elements analysis, relevant to define the values of the building for the local and international community. The awareness of these concepts oriented the digital documentation and training activities, developed between 2016 and 2017, for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (BACA) in Bahrain. The developed activities had two main aims: A) support the local staff in using specific recording techniques to efficiently document and consequently preserve built heritage sites with appropriate accuracy and in a relatively short period; b) develop a pilot project in collaboration with BACA to validate the capacity of the team to accurately document and produce measured records for the conservation and management of Bahrain built heritage. The documentation project has been developed by a multidisciplinary team of experts from BACA, Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS), Carleton University, Canada and a contracted researcher from the Gicarus Lab, Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI) in Italy. In the training activities, the participants have been exposed to a wide range of recording techniques, illustrating them the selection criteria for the most suitable one, according to requirements, site specifications, categories of values identified for the various built elements, and budget. The pilot project has been tested on three historical structures, both with strong connotations in the Bahrain cultural identity: The Shaikh Isa bin Ali house, Aljazzaf house and the Siyadi Majlis. These two buildings, outstanding examples of Bahrain architecture as well as tangible memory of the country history, have been documented employing several digital techniques, including: Aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry, rectifying photography, total station and 3D laser scanning

TUTANKHAMEN’S TWO TOMBS: REPLICA CREATION AND THE PRESERVATION OF OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

There are two tombs of Tutankhamen both located in Luxor, Egypt: one in the Valley of the Kings, excavated into the Theban bedrock and decorated with wall paintings, dating from 1323 BCE; the other, installed 3 km away, opened in April 2014 and is considered to be an ‘exact facsimile’ of the original tomb. Tutankhamen’s tomb is just one example of a cultural heritage site that has been replicated. This list is steadily growing as replicas are finding renewed favour fuelled by technological advancements in three-dimensional recording, capture and fabrication which has enabled the production of highly accurate replicas in both physical and virtual form. Comparisons drawn between the two tombs of Tutankhamen—the original and the replica—aim to highlight the differing approaches of parallel preservation projects and intends to prompt questions surrounding the commissioning and use of replicas in the cultural heritage field and the growing role that 3D digital technology is playing in the preservation/conservation sector. Sites and cultural heritage organization are scrambling to be part of the 3D digital revolution. But, has the transition to 3D and the revival in replicas happened too quickly and at the expense of a site’s other conservation needs? Is technology being used in the service of conservation and preservation or is it the other way around? How can those working with heritage balance the benefit of 3D technology with the overall conservation needs for a site? Using the example of Tutankhamen’s two tombs this paper aims to provoke discussion on these topics

Dive into heritage: a digital documentation platform of world heritage properties in the Arab states region

The world celebrated the 50 years of the World Heritage Convention. With more than 1000 cultural and natural sites, the 1972 World Heritage Convention is the most widely recognized. It has provided a framework for identifying, documenting, protecting, and managing the world's cultural and natural heritage with Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). The theme to mark this anniversary is: “The Next 50: World Heritage as a Source of Resilience, Humanity and Innovation”. These are the topics that have inspired the World Heritage Centre to develop, together with the Member States in the Arab Region, an online platform that leverages digital technologies to safeguard and promote the UNESCO World Heritage sites and its related intangible heritage, and transmit them to future generations. This paper discusses the current state of digital documentation of cultural heritage and the related projects/initiatives in the Arab States region. It presents the UNESCO Dive into Heritage initiative and its first outcomes. It concludes with lessons learned and future steps for the next phases of the project. First outcomes have revealed the big challenge of 3D data integration and the need to accompany the implementation stages of the project with capacity building

A WORKFLOW FOR GEOMETRIC COLOUR PHOTOGRAPHY OF PAINTED SURFACES

Colour fidelity is vital when documenting painted surfaces. The 2.5D nature of many painted surfaces makes orthophotos and digital surface models (DSMs) common products of the documentation process. This paper presents a workflow to combine photographic and photogrammetric methods to produce aligned colour and depth (orthophotos and DSMs). First, two photogrammetric software (Agisoft Photoscan and Capturing Reality Reality Capture) were tested to determine if they adjusted the colour data during the processing stages. It was found that Photoscan can produce 16-bit orthophotos without manipulating the data; however, Reality Capture is currently limited to 8-bit results. When capturing a surface using photogrammetry, it is common to use the same data for colour and depth. The presented workflow, however, argues that better colour accuracy can be achieved by capturing the two datasets separately and combining them in photogrammetric software. The workflow is demonstrated through the documentation of an unnamed religious painting from the 17th century

Towards a virtual hub approach for landscape assessment and multimedia ecomuseum using multitemporal-maps

Landscapes are dynamic entities, stretching and transforming across space and time, and need to be safeguarded as living places for the future, with interaction of human, social and economic dimensions. To have a comprehensive landscape evaluation several open data are needed, each one characterized by its own protocol, service interface, limiting or impeding this way interoperability and their integration. Indeed, nowadays the development of websites targeted to landscape assessment and touristic purposes requires many resources in terms of time, cost and IT skills to be implemented at different scales. For this reason these applications are limited to few cases mainly focusing on worldwide known touristic sites. The capability to spread the development of web-based multimedia virtual museum based on geospatial data relies for the future being on the possibility to discover the needed geo-spatial data through a single point of access in an homogenous way. In this paper the proposed innovative approach may facilitate the access to open data in a homogeneous way by means of specific components (the brokers) performing interoperability actions required to interconnect heterogeneous data sources. In the specific case study here analysed it has been implemented an interface to migrate a geo-swat chart based on local and regional geographic information into an user friendly Google Earth^©-based infrastructure, integrating ancient cadastres and modern cartography, accessible by professionals and tourists via web and also via portable devices like tables and smartphones. The general aim of this work on the case study on the Lake of Como (Tremezzina municipality), is to boost the integration of assessment methodologies with digital geo-based technologies of map correlation for the multimedia ecomuseum system accessible via web. The developed WebGIS system integrates multi-scale and multi-temporal maps with different information (cultural, historical, landscape levels) represented by thematic icons allowing to transfer the richness of the landscape value to both tourists and professionals

A metadata based approach for analyzing UAV datasets for photogrammetric applications

This paper proposes a methodology for pre-processing and analysing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) datasets before photogrammetric processing. In cases where images are gathered without a detailed flight plan and at regular acquisition intervals the datasets can be quite large and be time consuming to process. This paper proposes a method to calculate the image overlap and filter out images to reduce large block sizes and speed up photogrammetric processing. The python-based algorithm that implements this methodology leverages the metadata in each image to determine the end and side overlap of grid-based UAV flights. Utilizing user input, the algorithm filters out images that are unneeded for photogrammetric processing. The result is an algorithm that can speed up photogrammetric processing and provide valuable information to the user about the flight path

DIVE INTO HERITAGE: A DIGITAL DOCUMENTATION PLATFORM OF WORLD HERITAGE PROPERTIES IN THE ARAB STATES REGION

The world celebrated the 50 years of the World Heritage Convention. With more than 1000 cultural and natural sites, the 1972 World Heritage Convention is the most widely recognized. It has provided a framework for identifying, documenting, protecting, and managing the world's cultural and natural heritage with Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). The theme to mark this anniversary is: “The Next 50: World Heritage as a Source of Resilience, Humanity and Innovation”. These are the topics that have inspired the World Heritage Centre to develop, together with the Member States in the Arab Region, an online platform that leverages digital technologies to safeguard and promote the UNESCO World Heritage sites and its related intangible heritage, and transmit them to future generations. This paper discusses the current state of digital documentation of cultural heritage and the related projects/initiatives in the Arab States region. It presents the UNESCO Dive into Heritage initiative and its first outcomes. It concludes with lessons learned and future steps for the next phases of the project. First outcomes have revealed the big challenge of 3D data integration and the need to accompany the implementation stages of the project with capacity building

A REVIEW OF RECORDING TECHNOLOGIES FOR DIGITAL FABRICATION IN HERITAGE CONSERVATION

Digital tools have brought new techniques for recording and fabrication allowing for the augmentation of traditional processes in repairs and restorations. Traditional mechanical and chemical techniques require physical contact to the artefacts of interest, while LiDAR Scanning, photogrammetry and structured light scanning provide non-invasive solutions. Analog recording technologies have always informed fabrication processes, but contemporary digital recording can produce complete geometry for fabrication. In this paper, we discuss recording and fabrication technologies and how they have been applied for heritage conservation