From Youtube to Blender: Forensic facial reconstruction of a child mummy

This post is about a practical application of a serie of studies published here in this blog.

After I started to study about forensic facial reconstruction I saw that is much more easy to find videos of CT-Scan than the DICOM files and other tomography formats.

A way to convert a video in a reconstructed mesh was described here.

Some days ago I was reading about mummies (desperate to find a CT-Scan) and I found this post:

http://erl.wustl.edu/research/imseg/mummy.html

It talks about a child mummy of St. Louis, that lived in a range of 40 BC and 130 AD. He died with 7 or 8 months.

Inside the matter had a video with some seconds of a CT-Scan slicing. I was able to convert it in a reconstructed mesh, and after I found a video on Youtbe with more qualty and I used it to make the final mesh, used in this post.

I downloaded the video with Videodownload Helper (Firefox) and it was converted in a image sequence and after in a serie of DICOM files.

Unfortunately I lost the original vetorial file and now we have only the infographic in Portuguese version, like you can see below (but it have a lot of images, that dispensing you to read it).

To make a reconstruction with historical and archaeological foundation I had the help of Moacir Elias Santos, archaeologist of the Egypt Museum and Rosacruz, from Brazil.

The animated gif above shows the extracted frames of the animation converted into a CT-Scan. I reduced the slices to make it more didatic.

I had a serie of dificulties to find landmarks to use on the child's face, cause appear that it doesn't exist. So I use a average of 3-8 year and rescale it to have at least a reference.

I use a serie of babies pictures to draw the line of the neck and ears.

Moacir sent me a compose image with the original mummy, that you can see below.

I hope you enjoy this post. I see you in the next. A big hug!

Arc-Team and Antrocom NPO start "Taung" project

"Taung" project starts: its aim is the craniofacial reconstruction of the fossil known as "Taung child", a specimen of Australopithecus africanus discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924 in a quarry near the town of the same name in South Africa.

"Taung" is a collaborative project between Antrocom non-profit organization, an association for anthropological studies, Arc-Team, a company that operates in the field of cultural heritage, and Cicero Moraes, an expert in 3D modeling applied to the forensic context.

The Museum of Anthropology of the University of Padua has provided the casts of its collection to the experts of Antrocom NPO and Arc-Team. Among the objectives of the project: to evaluate the applicability of the used method to the reconstruction of faces of contemporary human beings, to the paleoanthropological context and to create a database of examples of application of modern techniques of digital reconstruction to the anthropological context for research and popularization.

The researchers decided to work through a three-dimensional survey of the cast of Taung child at first, and then they decided to reconstruct the facial muscles of the skull through the observation and comparison of DICOM scans of primates.

In particular, the three-dimensional survey of the find was made through techniques of Structure from Motion and Image-Based Modeling (SFM / IBM), using only free and open source software (Python Photogrammetry Toolbox). For the digital reconstruction of the facial musculature researchers chose open source programs (including Blender), modeling using the technique of "metaballs" the needed muscle bundles, while they will be used mainly the free software InVesalius for the comparison with DICOM data of other primates.

The project is located in a wider context of research that aims to explore the application of digital techniques in the museum context, with particular attention to the findings of anthropological nature.

The search results will be released as soon as possible in turn under an open source license and therefore freely distributed. Antrocom NPO and Arc-Team would like to thank, for their invaluable cooperation, the Museum of Anthropology of University of Padua, in the person of the keeper, dr. Nicola Carrara, and the Centre for Museums of University of Padua.

Antrocom non-profit organization promotes and encourages the development of studies of physical and cultural anthropology, working in scientific research, education, training and in the popularization of anthropological sciences. The Association is careful to perceive and enhance both the local tradition that the new technological perspective applied to anthropology.

Arc-Team sas is a company based in Cles (TN, Italy) formed up by young archaeologists and anthropologists working in the field of cultural heritage, characterized by wide-ranging collaborations at national and international levels. In particular, it deals with archaeological excavations, documentation and digital modeling (2D and 3D), GIS geoarchaeology, WebGIS, paleopathology, anthropology and musealization.