Towards 3D Digitization in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) Sector – Lessons Learned and Future Outlook

The European Cultural Heritage Strategy for the 21st century, within the Digital Agenda, one of the flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy, has led to an increased demand for fast, efficient and faithful 3D digitization technologies for cultural heritage artefacts. 3D digitization has proven to be a promising approach to enable precise reconstructions of objects. Yet, unlike the digital acquisition of cultural goods in 2D which is widely used and automated today, 3D digitization often still requires significant manual intervention, time and money. To enable heritage institutions to make use of large scale, economic, and automated 3D digitization technologies, the Competence Center for Cultural Heritage Digitization at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD has developed CultLab3D, the world’s first fully automatic 3D mass digitization technology for collections of three-dimensional objects. 3D scanning robots such as the CultArm3D-P are specifically designed to automate the entire 3D digitization process thus allowing to capture and archive objects on a large-scale and produce highly accurate photo-realistic representations. The unique setup allows to shorten the time needed for digitization from several hours to several minutes per artefact