Figure 6. The documentation of a statue of Emperor Augustus was one of many to come out of the collaboration between Mensi and
the Coignard family in the 1990s. This example was one of the earliest attempts at creating a digital surrogate from an artifact. The
point cloud (left) was used to generate a solid mesh (middle), which was then used to create a precise replica of the statue (right).
CloudCompare
Figure 7. The example above is a Poisson shading of inscribed stone surface from the Tristan Stone in Cornwall, UK. Scan
data was processed in CloudCompare and the test was carried out by George Bevan, Queens University, Canada. It built on
previous work published by Adam P. Spring and Caradoc Peters outlined in the
Journal of Archaeological Science
article
(Spring and Peters 2014). Developing a low-cost 3D imaging solution for inscribed stone surface analysis. The on site
collection of data is also seen in Figure 3 of part two of this article.
CloudCompare was developed as part of a PhD thesis between 2004-2007 by Daniel Girardeau-Montaut. Girardeau-
Montaut was working between Telecom ParisTech and
EDF
Research and Development (
R&D
) at that time. The software was
initially geared toward industrial plant applications for "as-built" monitoring. This included the reporting and simulation of
maintenance operations. However, previous mid-range
TLS
experience gained in organizations like
EDF
through
MENSI
- which
included the heritage preservation work of
EDF
engineer Guillaume Thibault - took its development in other directions as
well. For example, both the ambient occlusion shader (also referred to as 2D skydome) and unroll functions were implement-
ed by Girardeau-Montaut and Florent Duguet as part of scanning work done on the Omphalos in the museum at Delphi (Du-
guet
et al.
2004; Thibault and Martinez 2007; Tarini
et al.
2003). They represented features being implemented into software
because of
CH
carried by
EDF
. The scans themselves were also inspired by Marc Levoy’s research group – more specifically the
work that had been done as part of the Digital Michelangelo Project (
INSIGHT
2018). Kevin Cain, who is discussed further in
the sections
Cultural Heritage as Marketing (Second to Third Phase)
and
The Non-profit Corporations (Third Phase)
in Part
two of this article, was also involved in the project.
Along with former Chief Technology Officer (
CTO
) of
MENSI
, Xin Chen, Guillaume - who supervised the development of
CloudCompare – was instrumental in the development of the
SOISIC
scanners. Included in this development was the 3Dipsos
software, as well as his involvement with both the Coignard family and
CH
projects discussed later in part two. CloudCompare
uses an octree file structure that subdivides point cloud data into eight sections within the same coordinate system. This reduc-
es the computational power needed to work with large datasets, such as scandata, by spreading tasks between eight sections.
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July 2020
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
