Photorealistic Rendering over the Internet for Restoration Support of Ancient Buildings

In the field of cultural heritage restoration, experts are extremely interested in the analysis the large amounts of data describing the condition and history of ancient monuments. In this paper we describe a method and its implementation for providing high quality photorealistic image synthesis of ancient buildings over the Internet through VRML and Java technology. A network-based Java application manages geometric 3D VRML models of an ancient building to provide an interface to add information and to compute high quality photorealistic snapshots of the entire model or any of its parts. The poor quality VRML real time rendering is upheld by a slower but more accurate rendering computed on a radiometric basis. The input data for this advanced rendering is taken from the geometric VRML model. We have also implemented some extensions to provide spectral data including the measurement of light and materials obtained experimentally. The interface to access the ancient building database is the descriptive VRML model itself. The Java application enhances the interaction with the model to provide and manage high quality images that allow visual qualitative evaluation of restoration hypotheses by providing a tool to improve the appearance of the resulting image under assigned lighting conditions.