Quick textured mesh generation for massive 3D digitization of museum artifacts

The goal of the "3D Icons" European Project, is to provide Europeana with accurate 3D models of Cultural Heritage artifacts. The purpose of this paper is to describe the specific optimized processing pipeline that has been set-up for digitizing a significant part of the Civic Archaeological Museum in Milan (Italy). Many technical and logistic issues for capturing 3D models in a Museum environment are addressed. In such framework the main problem is generating a good result by the technical point of view, minimizing the impact on the usual Museum activity during 3D capture operations, while shortening the processing time to the minimal allowed by the different applicable techniques. This condition led to precise choices related to the 3D acquisition techniques to be used (SfM), and the related data processing. This paper illustrates the aforementioned systematic aspects through three practical examples, showing good practices for image capturing and some 3D processing optimizations that allowed to speed the 3D models production at a level compliant to the final goal of more than 500 models in 36 months.