Software recovery: e-foto rectification module for 64 bit

As you can see from this mail (ArcheOS developer mailing list), since July 2011 one of the problem in mainatinnig ArcheOS e-foto package was related with the rectification module of this software. In fact this module seems to be abbandoned in the latest releases. Unfortunatly this code is very important for our archaeological field-work, being connected with the Metodo Aramus (the procedure we use to obtain georeferencad photomosaics).

e-foto's rectification module at work (Metodo Aramus)

For this reason I fisrt tried to contact the software developers (in the official forum) and then, having too few time to dedicate to this problem (I know, my fault...), I decide to upload the code on github at this link: https://github.com/archeos/rectify. This solution should help to keep the rectification module of e-foto ("rectify") an active project as a stand-alone application, avoiding the risk to become an abbandonware.

However, looking to the development of ArcheOS new release (codename Theodoric), there was still a big problem: I was not able to compile "rectify" with Qt4 also for 64 bit, as ArcheOS 5 should have both a 32 and a 64 bit version.

To solve this situation I asked again the help of the community, writing a post in the italian Qt forum. As you can see from the discussion (sorry, just italian) an user (Tom) helped me in updating the source code. It was necessary to modify just two files: matriz.cpp and matriz.h, so I did a new commit on github and now the code is ready to be compiled with Qt4. I did not yet packaged rectify for 64 bit, but I will do it ASAP. Anyway if someone has this kind of machine and needs to compile the module, he can use the source-code in github (It should work, but if there are problems please report them).

I hope it was usefull.

Ciao.

The commit in the source code (Github)

More info about the archaeological automatic drawing technique

Yesterday I was looking the statistics regarding this blog and I noticed that one of the most popular post is the one about the automatic drawing technique we (Alessandro Bezzi, Simone Cavalieri and me) proposed some years ago. I noticed as well that i forgot to upload in Arc-Team's open library the presentation we did in Foggia (for ArcheoFOSS 5) about this argument (sorry, just in Italian by now...). Now the link is active and you can download the presentation here, or in Academia.edu.
As the slides are in Italian I summarize here the experiment we did in that occasion. We divided archaeological finds in four classes, looking which kind of documentation normally they need.

1) photographic documentation (e.g coins)
2) simple drawing (e.g. flint)
3) drawing + shading (e.g. normal artefacts)
4) drawing + shading + section (e.g. pottery)


Then we developed a five steps techniques to get the appropriate documentation for each class in a automatic or semi-automatic way (using only FLOSS, of course):

1. rectified photo (GRASS - efoto)
2. rectified photo + vector drawing (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP)
3. rectified photo + vector drawing + shading (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP - stippler -  Inkscape)
4. rectified photo + vector drawing + shading + section (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP - stippler - Inkscape - hardware)

Here is an image with the original picture of the archaeological finds we used as test and the final layout.

All the finds come from the excavation in the church of S. Andrea in Storo (TN - Italy) and gave us positive results (I just used to many points in stippler for the drawing of the pottery... anyway it is now easy to change this parameter with the new python interface Alessandro developed).

In the slides you will also find our first test on Lena picture:

The image has nothing to do with sexism, she is just o kind of standard since 70's for raster images tests... by the way she is beautiful :)

2016-04-28 Post updated

In 2010 we wrote an article (in Italian) about this technique:

"Proposta per un metodo informatizzato di disegno archeologico" (here in ResearchGate and here in Academia).