Description
Book SynopsisThese fifteen papers explore the ways in which recent developments in imaging, image analysis, and image display and diffusion can be applied to objects of material culture in order to enhance historians'' understanding of the period from which the objects came (in this case, the remote past). In interpreting artefacts, the historian acts out a perceptual-cognitive task of transforming often noisy and impoverished signals into semantically rich symbols that have to be set within a cultural and historical context. Engineering scientists, equipped with a range of sophisticated techniques, equipment and highly specialised knowledge, are not always as aware as they might be of the range and the exact nature of problems faced by historians in interpreting objects of material culture. By providing the opportunity for scholars from these communities to explain to each other what they are doing and how, the papers explore the ways in which the scientific contributors and the historians are thi
Trade Review...a bold, original and well-illustrated collection of fifteen papers addressing state-of-the-art computer-based imaging of ancient visual culture, and it opens up a fruitful collaborative dialogue between the Humanities and the Sciences ... this volume will surely - as the Editors hoped - 'set a standard and a guideline for interdisciplinary research' * Mark Bradley, The Classical Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction ; Wooden stilus tablets from Roman Britain ; Shadow Stereo, image filtering, and constraint propagation ; Digitising cuneiform tablets ; Interpretation of ancient runic inscriptions by laser scanning ; Virtual reality, relative accuracy: modelling architecture and sculpture with VRML ; Automatic creation of virtual artefacts from video sequences ; At the foot of Pompey's statue: reconceiving Rome's theatrum lapideum ; Modelling Sagalassos: creation of a 3D archaeological virtual site ; Three-simensional laser imaging and processing in an archaeological context; ; Movements of the mental eye in pictorial space ; The potential for image analysis in numismatics ; Italian terra sigillata with applique decoration: digitising, visualising & web-publishing ; Shape from profiles ; The skull as the armature of the face: reconstructing ancient faces ; Reconstruction of a 3D mummy portrait from Roman Egypt
