Fadjar I. Thufail

Digital archives that support the three-dimensional (3D) digitization of cultural heritage sites are gaining popularity and attracting enormous interest as a critical strategy for digital preservation. This paper investigates the construction of a multimodal database for cultural heritage sites, which aims to preserve 3D data, images, videos and other materials along with multilingual text data. 3D scanning is widely used for efficient and accurate digitization of cultural heritages. However, some sites have been damaged entirely or partially, or sometimes, it is impossible to conduct 3D scanning of a portion of a site that is hidden from sight. At the Borobudur temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site, there are buried reliefs that are hidden at the basement and inaccessible for 3D scanning. Currently available data for these inaccessible portions of the site include old photos, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings and historical written descriptions. To digitally reconstruct 3D models of hidden parts, we introduce a method that use a single monocular photo. We constructed “Borobudur Visual Archives” to store, access, view and retrieve Borobudur-related digital assets, including the 3D data that we created.

The preservation and analysis of tangible cultural heritage sites have attracted enormous interest worldwide. Recently, establishing three-dimensional (3D) digital archives has emerged as a critical strategy for the permanent preservation and digital analysis of cultural sites. For extant parts of cultural sites, 3D scanning is widely used for efficient and accurate digitization. However, in many historical sites, many parts that have been damaged or lost by natural or artificial disasters are unavailable for 3D scanning. The remaining available data sources for these destroyed parts are photos, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, written descriptions, etc. In this paper, we achieve an integrated digital archive of a UNESCO World Heritage site, namely, the Borobudur temple, in which buried reliefs and internal foundations are not available for 3D scanning. We introduce a digitizing framework to integrate three different kinds of data sources and to create a unified point-cloud-type digital archive. This point-based integration enables us to digitally record the entire 3D structure of the target cultural heritage site. Then, the whole site is visualized by stochastic point-based rendering (SPBR) precisely and comprehensibly. The proposed framework is widely applicable to other large-scale cultural sites.