See-Through Museum project: processing and visualization for multi-modal data in conservation and cultural heritage

International Council of Museums lists a number of museums worldwide to be over 55'000. These institutions store millions of objects that constitute historical and scientific value, while only a small fraction of the whole number of objects is readily accessible to either researchers or museum visitors. Moreover, collection and analysis of the valuable data for the heritage objects is a complex and interdisciplinary process that can be inhibited by the lack of communication or technological availability. We believe, that an increasing number of heritage objects will be made accessible to a wider community through integration of various data acquisition technologies, data processing, storage, sharing and visualization solutions. The See-Through Museum Project is started this year in order to develop an integrated pipe-line that will include: dose-optimized X-ray CT and 3D optical data acquisition, modern tomographic reconstruction and artifacts reduction algorithms, registration and alignment of multi-modal data, analysis and visualization tools. Major contributors include several prominent museums in Netherlands and China, Dutch national research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI, Amsterdam) and the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP, Bejing). In our current work, we use test objects made of a wide range of materials provided by the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). During my talk, I will demonstrate the first results in the area of data acquisition and visualization for this test collection. Emphasis will be placed on the common artifacts reduction strategies, imaging of the features specific to certain materials and the use of motion tracking for visualization purposes.