Soil triangle integration in a PostgreSQL based system for archaeological recording sheets

This is the second presentation we gave at ArcheoFOSS 2016. This time the topic is more related with geoarchaeology and regards geTTexture (the open source application we developed in order to speed up the sedimentation est).

Here below is the link to the original presentation, for the reader who wants to see it directly online:

www.museidironzone.it/openLibrary/html/gettexture/gettexture.html

For those who prefer to see it on youtube, I just uploaded it on our channel:

Like for last post, I report here below a short abstract, describing shortly each slide of the presentation:

SLIDE 1

Title and overview

SLIDE 2

Compiling the archaeological recording sheet is one of the most time-expensive operation during an archaeological project both doing it manually...

SLIDE 3

... or using a database.

SLIDE 4

Considering the Italian standards (ICCD, "Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione"), often new archaeologists have difficulties in describing the composition of the archaeological layer.

SLIDE 5 and 6

SLIDE 7 and 8

No particular difficulties are detected in describing the artificial elements.

SLIDE 9 and 10

A little bit more complicated is considered to describe the organic and oranogenic elements.

SLIDE 11 and 12

The most difficult field is considered the geological one.

SLIDE 13

Geological materials are splitted into two categories: skeleton and fine earth

SLIDE 14 and 15

The skeleton is normally simpler to identify (both in the field and in the lab).

SLIDE 16 and 17

The fine earth is maybe the most complicated archaeological element to identify on the field, while specialist (geoarchaeologists) need to use specific equipement in the lab.

SLIDE 18

Fine earth definition on the field is foten carried on with anametric and sobjective methodology.

SLIDE 19

Like feel, ball and ribbon test

SLIDE 20

The sedimentation test gives more objective results with a minimum metric value.

SLIDE 21

Arc-Team used validated the use of sedimentation test also in emergency excavation (which have a stricter time-table respect other archaeological projects)

SLIDE 22

Thank to +Mattia Segata  (Arc-Team's geoarchaeologist at ATLAB), the basic methodology has been improved considering the Strokes' Law.

SLIDE 23

+Giuseppe Naponiello  (Arc-Team DataBase and WebGIS expert) improved a PostreSQL dabatase, developed on the Italian archaeological recording sheet. The Database is able to integrate the data coming from the sedimentation test.

SLIDE 24

Future integration are planned for basic analytical chemistry analyses on the field.

SLIDE 25

And for more specific laboratory analyses (e.g. Energy Disperive X-ray Spectrometry).

SLIDE 26

The DataBase can be easily integrated into a WebGIS

SLIDE 27

The slides is just a demonstration of the software (the code is taken from a prototype).

SLIDE 28

The slide is just an example of one of the videotutorial Arc-Team is producing to explain the sedimentation test and the use of geTTexture.

SLIDE 29

geTTexture will be one of the open source application for archaeology which Arc-Team is developing and that will compose the suite Arc-Tool.

SLIDE 30

Another extension of geTTexture Arc-Team is working on is related with colorimetry. The idea is to integrate a tool to record anametric analyses

SLIDE 31

or metric data coming from Open Hardware devices (e.g. Public Lab spectrometer)

SLIDE 32

Thak you for your attention

Have a nice day!

Automatic Soil Texture Triangle

As the regular ATOR readers know, since some years we are trying to improve our laboratory's technologies in order to achieve a better metric classification of archaeological data and to expand our research interests in other archaeological sub-disciplines and mainly in archaeo-anthropology (as well as taphonomy and mummiology), archaeo-zoology, archaeo-bothany in general (and carpology and dendrochronology in particular), geoarchaeology and archaeometry. 

Soon we will start a series of post about our lab (aka ATLAB, Arc-Team LABoratory), which is evolving fast thanks to the effort of +Gianluca Fondriest  and +Mattia Segata.

Today I want to illustrate one of the tool we developed to speed up the geo-archaeological interpretation of the soil texture of the different layers during our excavations. This project (which is now in its early stage) starts from the need to use the Soil Texture Triangle to help archaeologists (especially the new diggers) in correctly interpreting the texture components using an objective method like the sedimentation test (because often new archaeologists are not comfortable with more subjective analysis like the Ribbon test or the squeeze-ball test). I leave the explanations of the operations to perform on the field for another post, while I want here to show the small software "geTexture", which +Giuseppe Naponiello developed to use automatically the Soil Texture Triangle from internet.
To illustrate how the application works, I recorded a short videotutorial:

The software is currently just in Italian, but we will translate it in English soon. The development is still active and this can be considered just a pre-release (it will be implemented also with a tutorial explaining how to perform the sedimentation test on the excavation). If you want to help us, on GitHub you can find the source code, while if you need already to use the software, here is the link where is is accessible. In the next days I will try to program also a small app for Android devices.

Stay tuned and have a nice day!

Notes

Some of the results of ATLAB can be seen in the article "Lo Scavo archeologico professionale, innovazioni e best practice mediante metodologie aperte e Open Research" (here in ResearchGate and here in Academia)

OpenJUMP GIS: from a local (cartesyan) system to a projeced coordinate system

Sometimes we are asked why (after 11 years) we still keep OpenJUMP in ArcheOS, since QGIS became such a functional GIS  and could cover all the feature of the other similar software. The main reason for such a choice are two:

1. QGIS developed very fast and can happen that some tools are still buggy when released (like for the newest georeferencer version)

2. the software (Polygontool) our friend +Szabolcs Köllö (aka Keulemaster) developed for us, in order to handle big data in archaeological surveys, is strictly connected with OpenJUMP

The GIS OpenJUMP

Today I just finished to package for (ArcheOS Hypatia) the last version of this GIS (OpenJUMP 1.9.1) and to upload it in our experimental repository (soon we share it), so I prepared a new videotutorial to illustrate one of the operation in which OpenJUMP is still useful, since the similar tool of QGIS are sometimes buggy: the recovering of old excavation data from a local (cartesian) coordinate system to a projected coordinate system (e.g. in the videotutorial, ETRS89 / UTM zone 32 N).

I hope this can be useful. Have a nice day!

ArcheOS Hypatia, a new tool for 3D documentation: opnMVG-GUI

In these days we are working very hard to package new software for ArcheOS v. 6 (codename Hypatia). This time we just finished to work on the new GUI +Martin Greca developed for +Pierre Moulon software, openMVG, setting up all the requested dependencies. The result is a new tool for 3D photogrammetry in +ArcheOS: openMVG-GUI. This software can be considered as the evolution of the old Python Photogrammetry ToolBox, but we are currently working to fix some bugs of this application to keep providing it in ArcheOS, since it gave the best results in underground environment documentation.

Here below you an see a fast videotutorial I did for our brand new YouTube channel:

To speed up ArcheOS Hypatia development, we set up an unofficial new repository, which we will use (by now) just internally our society, to be sure that everything works fine before to release it publicly to all the users. Anyway we will share this repository also during the university courses in which we should teach this years, like the one in Evora (Portugal) or the one in Venice, since in this conditions it is possible to work under strict control, avoiding problems in unresolved package dependencies. As soon as the new repository will be hardly tested, we will open it, adding the coordinates to the ArcheOS main branch.

The new GUI (by +Martin Greca) for openMVG (by +Pierre Moulon)

 

PS

If you are interested, there are still available places for the course in Evora (regarding open source technologies and cultural heritage). Here more infos.

Have a nice day!

ArcheoFOSS I, proceedings of the workshop now available as Open Access

Hi all,

this fast post is to notify that are finally available as Open Access the proceedings of the first workshop "Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologici" (en: "Open Source, Free Software and Open Format in archaeological reasearch precesses"), which in the later editions will be known as ArcheoFOSS. The event took place in Grosseto in May 2006.

Since Open Access in archeology has always been one of the main topics of this workshop, some days ago we started a discussion on the official mailing list to try to free some of the proceedings which are actually available just as printed publications. The first result has been the release of the articles collected in the first edition, thanks to the kindness of Giancarlo Macchi Janica. Currently we are working on the other two workshops which are not yet available: ArcheoFOSS V (held in Foggia in 2010) and ArcheoFOSS VI (held in Neaples in 2011). 

The image below shows the front cover of the digital publication of the proceedings of the first edition, while here you can read the official announcement about the Open Access publication (pdf here).

Front cover of proceedings of the first workshop "Open Source, Free Software e Open Format nei processi di ricerca archeologici"

A special thanks also to +Stefano Costa for uploading everything on ArcheoFOSS website.

PS

In the proceedings you can also find some articles written by Arc-Team members, regarding:
1. One of the first release of ArcheOS (v.1.6): here in Academia and here in ResearchGate (by +Alessandro Bezzi, +Luca Bezzi, +Denis Francisci, +Rupert Gietl)
2.  The use of +GRASS GIS in archaeology: Academia / ResearchGate (by Michael Burton, +Alessandro Bezzi, +Luca Bezzi, +Denis Francisci, +Rupert Gietl, +Markus Neteler)
3. The use of FLOSS in a case of study in archaeology: Academia / ResearchGate (by +Luca Bezzi, Stefano Boaro, Giovanni Leonardi, +damiano lotto)

Doing quantitative archaeology with open source software

This short post is written for archaeologists who frequently perform common data analysis and visualisation tasks in Excel, SPSS or similar commercial packages. It was motivated by my recent observations at the Society of American Archaeology meeting in San Francisco - the largest annual meeting of archaeologists in the world - where I noticed that the great majority of archaeologists use Excel and SPSS. I wrote this post to describe why those packages might not be the best choices, and explain what one good alternative might be. There’s nothing specifically about archaeology in here, so this post will likely to be relevant to researchers in the social sciences in general. It’s also cross-posted on the Software Sustainability Institute blog.

Prevailing tools for data analysis and visualization in archaeology have severe limitations

For many archaeologists, the standard tools for any kind of quantitative analysis include Microsoft Excel, SPSS, and for more exotic methods, PAST. While these software are widely used, there are a few limitations that are obvious to anyone who has worked with them for a long time, and raise the question about what alternatives are available. Here are three key limitations:

• File formats: each program has its own proprietary format, and while there is some interoperability between them, we cannot open their files in any program that we wish. And because these formats are controlled by companies rather than a community of researchers, we have no guarantee that the Excel or SPSS file format of today will be readable by any software 10 or 20 years from now. 
• Click-trails: the main interaction with these programs is by using the mouse the point and click on menus, windows, buttons and so on. These mouse actions are ephemeral and unrecorded, so that many of the choices made during a quantitative analysis in Excel are undocumented. When a researcher wants to retrace the steps of their workflow days, months or years after the original effort, they are dependent on their memory or some external record of many of the choices made in an analysis. This can make it very difficult for another person to understand how an analysis was conducted because many of the details are not recorded. 
• Black boxes: the algorithms that these programs use for generating results are not available for convenient inspection to the researcher. The programs are a classic black box, where data and settings go it, and a result comes out, as if by magic. For moderately complicated computations, this can make it difficult for the researcher to interpret their results, since they do not have access to all of the details of the computation. This black box design also limits the extent to which the researcher can customise or extend built-in methods to new applications.

How to overcome these limitations?

For a long time archaeologists had few options to deal with these problems because there were few alternative programs. The general alternative to using a point-and-click program is writing scripts to program algorithms for statistical analysis and visualisations. Writing scripts means that the data analysis workflow is documented and preserved, so it can be revisited in the future and distributed to others for them to inspect, reuse or extend. For many years this was only possible using ubiquitous but low-level computer languages such as C or Fortran (or exotic higher level languages such as S), which required a substantial investment of time and effort, and a robust knowledge of computer science. In recent years, however, there has been a convergence of developments that have dramatically increased the ease of using a high level programming language, specifically R, to write scripts to do statistical analysis and visualisations. As an open source programming language with special strengths in statistical analysis and visualisations, R has the potential to be a solution to the three problems of using software such as Excel and SPSS. Open source means that all of the code and algorithms that make the program operate are available for inspection and reuse, so that there is nothing hidden from the user about how the program operates (and the user is free to alter their copy of the program in any way they like, for example, to increase computation speed).

Three reasons why R has become easier to use

Although R was first released in 1993, it has only been in the last five years or so that it has really become accessible and a viable option for archaeologists. Until recently, only researchers steeped in computer science and fluent in other programming languages could make effective use of R. Now the barriers to getting started with R are very low, and archaeologists without any background with computers and programming can quickly get to a point where they can do useful work with R. There are three factors that are relevant to the recent increase in the usability of R, and that any new user should take advantage of:

• the release of an Integrated Development Environment, RStudio, especially for R
• the shift toward more user-friendly idioms of the language resulting from the prolific contributions of Hadley Wickham, and 
• the massive growth of an active online community of users and developers from all disciplines.

1. RStudio

For the beginner user of R, the free and open source program RStudio is by far the easiest way to quickly get to the point of doing useful work. First released in 2011, it has numerous conveniences that simplify writing and running code, and handling the output. Before RStudio, an R user had little more than a blinking command line prompt to work with, and might struggle for some time to identify efficient methods for getting data in, run code (especially if more than a few lines) and then get data and plots out for use in reports, etc. With RStudio, the barriers to doing these things are lowered substantially. The biggest help is having a text editor right next to the R console. The text editor is like a plain text editor (such as Notepad on Windows), but has many features to help with writing code. For example, it is code-aware and automatically colours the text to make it a lot easier to read (functions are one colour, objects another, etc.). The code editor has comprehensive auto-complete feature that shows suggested options while you type, and gives in-context access to the help documentation. This makes spelling mistakes rare when writing code, which is very helpful. There is a plot pane for viewing visualisations and buttons for saving them in various formats, and a workspace pane for inspecting data objects that you've created. These kinds of features lower the cognitive burden to working with a programming language, and make it easier to be productive with a limited knowledge of the language.

2. The Hadleyverse

A second recent development that makes it easier for a new user to be productive using R is a set of contributed packages affectionately known in the R user community as the Hadleyverse. User contributed packages are add-on modules that extend the functionality of base R. Base R is what you get when you download R from r-project.org, and while it is a complete programming language, the 6000-odd user contributed packages provide ready-made functions for a vast range of data analysis and visualization tasks. Because the large number of packages can make discovering relevant ones challenges, they have been organised into 'task views' that list packages relevant to specific areas of analysis. There is a task view for archaeology, providing an annotated list of R packages useful for archaeological research. Among these user-contributed packages are a set by Hadley Wickham (Chief Scientist at RStudio and adjunct Professor at Rice University) and his collaborators that make plotting better, simplify common data analysis activities, speed up importing data in R (including from Excel and SPSS files), and improve many other common tasks. The overall result is that for many people, programming in R is shifting from the base R idioms to a new set of idioms enabled by Wickham's packages. This is an advantage for the new user of R because writing code with Wickham's packages results in code that is easier to read by people, as well as being highly efficient to compute. This is because it simplifies many common tasks (so the user doesn't have to specify exotic options if they don't want to), uses common English verbs ('filter', 'arrange', etc.), and uses pipes. Pipes mean that functions are written one after the other, following the order they would appear in when you explain the code to another person in conversation. This is different from the base R idiom, which doesn't have pipes and instead has functions nested inside each other, requiring them to be read from the center (or inside of the nest) to the left (outside of the nest), and use temporary objects, which is a counter-intuitive flow for most people new to programming.

3. Big open online communities of users

A third major factor in the improved accessibility of R to new users is the growth of an active online communities of R users. There has long been an email list for R users, but more recently, user communities have former around websites such as Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is a free question-and-answer website for programmers using any language. The unique concept is that it gamifies the process of asking and answering questions, so that if you ask a good question (ie. well-described, includes a small self-contained example of the code that is causing the problem), other users can reward your effort by upvoting your question. High quality questions can attract very quick answers, because of the size of the community active on the site. Similarly, if you post a high-quality answer to someone else's question, other users can recognise this by upvoting your answer. These voting processes make the site very useful even for the casual R user searching for answers (and who may not care for voting), because they can identify the high-quality answers by the number of votes they've received. It's often the case that if you copy and paste an error message from the R console into the google search box, the first few results will be Q&A pages on Stackoverflow. This is very different experience compared to using the r-help email list, where help can come slowly, if at all, and searching the email list, where it's not always clear which is the best solution. Another useful output from the online community of R users are blogs that document how to conduct various analyses or produce visualizations (some 500 blogs are aggregated at http://www.r-bloggers.com/). The key advantage to Stackoverflow and blogs, aside from their free availability, is that they very frequently include enough code for the casual user to reproduce the described results. They are like a method exchange, where you can collect a method in the form of someone else's code, and adapt it to suit your own research workflow.

There's no obvious single explanation for the growth of this online community of R users. Contributing factors might include a shift from SAS (a commercial product with licensing fees) to R as the software to teach students with in many academic departments, due to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 that forced budget reductions at many universities. This led to a greater proportion of recent generations of graduates being R users. The flexibility of R as a data analysis tool, combined with  rise of data science as an attractive career path, and demand for data mining skills in the private sector may also have contributed to the convergence of people who are active online that are also R users, since so many of the user contributed packages are focused on statistical analyses.

So What?

The prevailing programs used for statistical analyses in archaeology have severe limitations resulting from their corporate origins (proprietary file formats, uninspectable algorithms) and mouse-driven interfaces (impeding reproducibility). The generic solution is an open source programming language with tools for handling diverse file types and a wide range of statistical and visualization functions. In recent years R has become the a very prominent and widely used language that fulfills these criteria. Here I have briefly described three recent developments that have made R highly accessible to the new user, in the hope that archaeologists who are not yet using it might adopt it as more flexible and useful program for data analysis and visualization than their current tools. Of course it is quite likely that the popularity of R will rise and fall like many other programming languages, and ten years from now the fashionable choice may be Julia or something that hasn't even been invented yet. However, the general principle that a scripted analyses using an open source language is better for archaeologists, and science generally, will remain true regardless of the details of the specific language.

Digital bones. New technologies for anthropological disciplines

Hi all,

we are organizing an open lesson in Padua on 5 June. The title is "Digital bones. Nuove tecnologie al servizio delle discipline archeologiche" ("Digital bones. New technologies for anthropological disciplines") and the topic will be the application of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) to Tanatology in archeology and forensic sciences.

The lesson will be held at 10.00 in the Aula Emiciclo of the Orto Botanico, which is the world's oldest academic botanical garden that is still in its original location, as it was founded in 1545 by the Venetian Republic (so it can be also an occasion to visit to this monument).

The Aula Emiciclo (image in Public Domain form PHAIDRA system)

The speakers will be:

Nicola Carrara (Museum of Anthropology of Padua University), with a general introduction to tanatology

Luca Bezzi (Arc-Team), with a lesson/demonstration of 2D documentation through GIS of funerary contexts

Alessandro Bezzi (Arc-Team), with a lesson/demonstration of 3D documentation through SfM/IBM of funerary contexts

Cicero Moraes (Arc-Team), with a lesson/demonstration of digital forensic facial reconstruction

The attendance is free and during the lesson will be also given a preview of ArcheOS 5 (Theodoric), especially regarding its use for archeoanthropological aspects.

ArcheOS for anthopologists!

For more details and informations, here below is the poster of the lesson.

The poster regarding the lesson

You can also visit the FB event page (connected with the exhibition "FACCE. Imolti volti della storia umana"), where, if interested, you can register for the lesson.

Have a nice day!

ArcheoFOSS IX edition, deadline extended

Just a fast service communication,

for who is interested, the deadline of the 9th edition of the ArcheoFOSS has been extended till April 25. Here is the official report (from +piergiovanna grossi):

"IX Workshop Free / Libre and Open Source Software and Open Format in the archaeological research processes.

From survey to data sharing. Technologies , methodologies and languages ​​of open archeology. 

Verona , 19-20 June 2014 (IT)

To encourage the submission of proposals, the deadline has been extended till April 25. The organizing committee's aim is to support the broadest participation in the joint construction of a workshop of increasing quality, hoping that new proposals can be submitted by scholars, researchers, students, professionals, archaeological companies and associations, working in the field of Cultural Heritage and the FLOSS application.For proposal submission, please refer to the Call for proposals page.For more informations on the workshop, you can visit the page of ArcheoFOSS 2014."

The Arena of Verona (CC-BY-SA 3.0, author: Lo Scaligero)

ArcheoFOSS 2013, deadline extension

If I give a coin to you and you give me a coin, each of us will have a coin, but if I give an idea to you and you give me an idea, than each of us will have two ideas.

(Chinese proverb)

Hi all,

the deadline for ArcheoFOSS workshop 2013 (open source, free software and open format in archaeological research processes) has been extended (if you do not know this meeting, see this previous post).

It is possible to submit paper proposal until April 15th, while suggestions for special sessions will be accepted till the 5th of the same month.

The main topics for the workshop 2013 will be:

• Methods and experiences of collaboration between different organizations and institutions in the field of cultural heritage, involving the use and the development of open source, free software and open format.
• Methods and experience using open source, open data, free software and open format in archeology and ICT.
• Methods, experiences and development of technological tools during open collaborations between multidisciplinary research areas (humanities and science) in the field cultural heritage.
• Contributions on the state of the art and proposals for regulations and laws, relating to the management and sharing of cultural heritage in order to support free communication, accessibility and enjoyment.
• Teaching and sharing archaeological methodologies using FLOSS.

The workshop will take place in Catania (Sicily) on 18 and 19 June. As it happened with the previous event, it will be an excellent opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas, knowledge and technology in the field of open archeology.

It is Carnival!

Once we were young and stupid, now we are no more young

(quote attributed to Mick Jagger)

OK, I am stupid, but the Taung Child face was the only 3D data I had in my computer at this moment, so I gave a try to a software we would like to add in ArcheOS.

We are working on the implementation of some new functionalities for the next release (Theodoric), especially regarding a good 3d engine and some augmented reality applications. I think Alessandro, surfing on the net, found the right open source software (openspace3d) and, with the help of ORNis (aka Romain Janvier) we hope to port it in GNU/Linux as soon as possible.

So here is the result of the first test:

Do not worry for the slow reaction of the software, it is mainly caused by the on-line screen recorder I was using to register the video (it was based on Java and it slowed down a little bit the applications that were running on my computer...). As usual, if you want to help us (also for software evaluation), just join ArcheOS channel on IRC.

Stay tuned :).

Forensic Facial Reconstruction of Virtual Mummy (1997)

Indeed, according the Virtual Mummy's official site, the CT-Scan was made in 1991, so it have more than twenty years! 

I choosed the year of 1997 because it was the creation of Virtual Mummy, a project where some researchers of University of Hamburg-Eppendorf shared a couple of interactive .MOV files used to reconstruct this mummy.

The original project can be visited here: http://www.voxel-man.de/gallery/virtual_mummy/

The links of the interactive movies can be viewed here: http://www.voxel-man.de/gallery/virtual_mummy/scenes.html

I was not able to find a lot information about the mummy. Only that she was 30 years old when died, more than 2300 years ago.

I would like to register the power of Blender's video editor to select the area of interest and isolate it.

In this case, the little area of the CT-Scan.

Even with the little dimensions of the CT-Scan I was able to get a good quality of 3D reconstruction using IMG2DCM and InVesalius.

To put the model in the right proportions, I used the images inside this article: http://www.uke.de/institute/medizinische-informatik/downloads/institut-medizinische-informatik/pommert-mc1991.pdf

With the skull in my hands, the reconstruction was done.

I hope it can be useful and enjoyable for you, like was to me.

A big hug and I see you in the next article!

Kinect 3D limits: documentation of small objects

As Moreno Tiziani wrote in his post, last Monday (October 22) I was in Padua to start the "Taung Project". The first step of this research was indeed the 3D documentation of the cast of the Taung Child, preserved in the Museum of Anthropology of Padua University. 

To digitally register our subject we chose SfM/IBM techniques (using ArcheOS and PPT), because, as I reported in this post, the methodology is accurate enough to document small objects. Nevertheless I brought in Padua also our hacked Kinect, to show Moreno how this system is working in 3D recording operations. 

Red circle: Kinect. Green circle Taung Child's cast. Blue circle: RGBDemo compiling on ArcheOS

 As we thought, the cast was too small to be documented with Kinect. The reason is clear: when Kinect is too close, it simply does not "see" the subject to record, while when the device is too far away, it register too few 3D points, so that the final mesh is not accurate enough. 

Unfortunately, I did not capture a screenshot of our test, but I think the images below illustrate the concept: in the first picture my hand is to close to the sensor and it appears completely black, while in the second picture Kinect can see my hand, which appears pink, but the resolution is too low.

The sensor is too close to the subject

The distance between the sensor and the subject is adequate, but the resolution is too low

However we used Kinect to document something in the Museum of Anthropology: a wooden Egyptian sarcophagus. 

As you can see in the short movie below, we registered just one side of the object, for the same reason I explained before: when Kinect is too close to the subject it does not work properly. In this case the position of the sarcophagus was too close to the wall (almost 50 cm) and to a glass showcase (almost 20 cm). It would have been possible to scan all the three visible faces and join them together in post-processing with MeshLab, but this was just an experiment, so we concentrate on the Taung cast. 

However in the movie it is also possible to observe another interesting characteristic of Kinect: being an infrared based device it is not able to go through glass, which is registered like a normal opaque object.

I hope it was useful, have a nice day!

Kinect 3D outdoor: first test

It was a sunny September Sunday, so I decided to take a walk with my wife Kathi and show her one of the hermitages located in the valley in which we live (Val di Non, Trentino, Italy). 

My second thought was that the ramble was a perfect opportunity to test the hacked Kinect and try to document in 3D the main wall of S. Gallo's ruins (the remains of the hermitage). So I prepared the backpack with Kinect, the external battery and the rugged pc we normally use on the archaeological excavations. 

After half an hour's walk throught apple orchards and woods we reached the hermitage. Along the way we also found a stunned rooster. That was strange! A rooster, in italian "gallo", in the S. Gallo's hermitage...

However, we began to try to document the main wall of the ruins, which you can see in the picture below...

S. Gallo's hermitage, with the rooster

... but, probably due to direct sunlight conditions, Kinect and RGBDemo where not working propertly.

In fact, as you can also read in M. Dalla Mura, M. Aravecchia and M. Zanin poster (during "LOW COST 3D: sensori, algoritmi e applicazioni" workshop), "...The main issue is due to direct Sun illumination that leads to saturation in the depth acquisition...". Moreover the software (RGBDemo) was reacting very slowly, but this was probably due to the hardware (Panasonic Thougbook), which is less powerful compared to the laptop I normally use to work. Secondly also RGBDemo seems to work better on GNU/Linux (ArcheOS), the Operating System which runs my laptop, than in Windows, the rugged PC OS (but this could be just my impression). 

Not beeing satisfied with the results I get with the 3D documentation of the ruins (software too slow to manage all the data recording process, high errors on the sunny parts of the wall, etc...), I decided to check for another subject to document. Luckily in S. Gallo's hermitage are not missing the caves, so, with the help of Kathi, I did a fast digital 3D copy of the cave you see in the picture below.

S. Gallo's cave

This time the software was working good, fast enought to work on the field and with negligible errors in data acquiring. In the movie below it is possible to see the final pointcloud (not complete, but big enought to understand the quality of a 3D "field" documentation with Kinect).

After this test, our Kinect was ready to the "trial by fire" of a real (indoor) archaeological excavation, which will be the topic of one of the next posts in ATOR.

Ciao.

ArcheOS v.4 (Caesar) beta release presented during the ArcheoFOSS VII

Hi,

with a big delay I uploaded the slides of the official presentation of ArcheOS 4 (Caesar) beta release, during the ArcheoFOSS VII, which took place in Rome (23 and 23 June 2012). The file can be seen here (Academia) or here (Researchgate).

With our contribute we tried to satisfy the scientific committee guidlines, illustrating not only the new software integrated in ArcheOS, but also the archaeological methodology connected with the system. We also presented some projects in which ArcheOS has been used, the community feedbacks and a preview of the future developments.

I would like to thank both Roberto Angeletti (aka BobMax) and Alessandro Furieri (SpatiaLite) for the fruitful discussions in Rome.

Python Photogrammetry Toolbox (PPT) and a turntable for 3D objects

I already answered on Pierre Moulon' Blog, but the question Tauricity did is very interesting. The question regards the possibility to document with PPT (Python Photogrammetry Toolbox) an object on a turntable, keeping the camera on a fix position. I had positive results when I tried with Giuseppe Naponiello (Arc-Team's anthropologitst) to document an human skull. We put the skull on a turntable with a black board behind (in this way the software does not recognize nothing exept the turntable and the skull); then we took a picture every 30 degrees. The only problem we had was during data elaboration, cause using PPT with Bundler 4 the software gave us a wrong result (it seems that it confused the two faces of the skull in the axial simmetry). Alessandro Bezzi helped us elaborating the data via shell and using Bundler 3 instead of Bundler 4 (cause he had a similar problem documenting the Theodoric Mausoleum in Ravenna) and this time there were no errors and we could do a dense pointcloud inside PMVS2. So it looks like that Bundler 4 has problems when objects have an axial (the skull) or a radial (the mausoleum) simmetry, but bundler 3 works perfectly.

Anyway it was possible for us to document an object on a turntable keeping the camera fix; the only tip was the black board to "erase" the background, so the software does not recognize points in it (which would be in conflict with the points of the object).

In this video is possible to see the result of the dense pointcloud.

Biosphere3D for ArcheOS

After Nicola Schiavotello's report in ArcheOS dev Mailing List I am trying to compile Biosphere3D in ArcheOS 4, to check its potential for an archaeological use.

The software looks good, but actually is supported only for Windows. I alredy tried to install it throght WINE or to check it in a Virtual Machine, but without results (anyway looks like it is not a good idea to virtualize this software, it needs a lot of RAM). Actually, as you can see from the image below, I am downloading the source code via svn (with subcommander). I hope to post good news soon about its compilation under a GNU/Linux system.

Subcommander (the GUI)