An Approach to 3D Digitisation and Segmentation of the Interior and Exterior of a Complex Museum Object

Abstract. The digitisation of cultural heritage objects is an important procedure to conserve, share and analyse artefacts from the past. Nowadays, it is common practice to digitise artefacts using DSLR cameras and Structure from Motion. For most objects, this is a suitable procedure, but in some cases, objects have narrow interiors which cannot be reached with common camera equipment. Our case study is a small kayak model (~ 1 × 0.1 × 0.15 m) from the 19th century with an interior that can only be documented through small openings (0.1 m radius). We developed a method using a modified webcam to safely digitise the interior of the kayak. By comparing three datasets of a test object, we describe advantages and disadvantages of the usage of integrated autofocus and colour balance of the webcam. Furthermore, we extended our approach for segmentation of 3D models to consider the interior and prepare the models for future analysis. There were no major differences between the models of the three datasets, and all of them could reduce the data gaps in the 3D model based on the DSLR images noticeably.