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Modelling Archaeological Collections  G Saravana Kumar Research Scholar gskumar@iitk.ac.in  Sanjay G Dhande Professor, CAD-P Laboratory, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India A rchaeological collections are vital elements that preserve the legacy and heritage of prehistory. The present work is a study carried out at Computer Aided Design Laboratory, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) to record and archive morphological features of artifacts from past cultures. The technology under study will allow archaeologists, researchers to view, analyze, and even reproduce artifacts in the absence of the original object. An ATOS II optical scanner digitizes the surface geometry of an artifact, the resulting data are stored as x, y, and z coordinate points and a connectivity list describes the relationship of the points to each other. The scanned surface is represented digitally as a collection of tiny triangles. The result is a 3D digital model that can be viewed, analyzed, manufactured, and manipulated electronically. A complete archaeological monument could be scanned and a digital model created. This model can be placed on to 3D Digital Terrain Model (DTM) obtained form satellite imaging to yield a detailed 3D model of the archaeological site along with monuments. Modelling art and archaeological forms The role of the Computer Aided Design (CAD) in creating artistic shapes is an emerging trend. Integration of art and technology has not been realized and one reason could be that the needs and goals of artists are far less predictive and structured. Reverse Engineering (RE) can help a sculptor to convert his physical creation into a digital form. The form thus captured can form a digital museum and one can manufacture the sculptor’s creation at any time through rapid prototyping (RP). Scaling up of models in digital domain is easy and thus a sculptor can make a small model and scan it and later make a physical instance of any size either through RP or CNC machining. A summary of session on Art and Rapid Prototyping is given by Michael Rees [1] and he discusses the concept of integration of art and science and its implications. A foreword to CAD journal by Se’quin [2] is again a thought provoking article. On the one hand the scope lies in creating new design tools for sculptors and on the other the scope lies in creating tools for modeling and manipulating archaeological collections and heritage artifacts digitally. Reconstruction of fossils, archaeological collections from fragmentary material requires morphological and artistic talents and is a modeling intensive task. Three dimensional graphical reconstruction and creation of physical models from this representation enable researchers to do their work more accurately without damaging the original artifact, which is not the case with traditional methods of reconstruction. Guangming Zhang et. al. [3] had done a work on reconstruction of Homunculus’s skull by rapid prototyping. A technical note by D’Urso et. al. [4] describes RP for biomodeling in palaeontology. The present study is a demonstration of the application of RE and RP in archaeological modeling and heritage preservation.  Fig. 1. The sculpture of Hanuman idol Technology Reverse engineering (RE) and rapid prototyping (RP) are emerging technologies that have been accepted to play a promising role as a data acquisition and form realization tool for free form sculpted surfaces. RE refers to the process acquiring point data from the surface of the part using a scanning or measurement device and creates a digital model of the same. In recent years, laser scanning has become a powerful tool in capturing the geometry of complicated models. The Computer Aided Design (CAD) model developed by an RE process can be converted into a physical prototype using an RP technique. Generally, in RP, prototypes are fabricated layer by layer. It uses additive manufacturing processes, which do not require any tools or setups compared to the subtractive techniques used in the traditional machining. Different fabrication methods exist for RP, but nearly all use the same geometry input format, called STL (Stereo Lithography), which consists of a list of triangular facet data.  Fig. 2. The point cloud and STL model of the digitized idol
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