Analysing Key Steps of the Photogrammetric Pipeline for Museum Artefacts 3D Digitisation

In recent years, massive digitisation of cultural heritage (CH) assets has become a focus of European programmes and initiatives. Among CH settings, attention is reserved to the immense and precious museum collections, whose digital 3D reproduction can support broader non-invasive analyses and stimulate the realisation of more attractive and interactive exhibitions. The reconstruction pipeline typically includes numerous processing steps when passive techniques are selected to deal with object digitisation. This article presents some insights on critical operations, which, based on our experience, can rule the quality of the final models and the reconstruction times for delivering 3D heritage results, while boosting the sustainability of digital cultural contents. The depth of field (DoF) problem is explored in the acquisition phase when surveying medium and small-sized objects. Techniques for deblurring images and masking object backgrounds are examined relative to the pre-processing stage. Some point cloud denoising and mesh simplification procedures are analysed in data post-processing. Hints on physically-based rendering (PBR) materials are also presented as closing operations of the reconstruction pipeline. This paper explores these processes mainly through experiments, providing a practical guide, tricks, and suggestions when tackling museum digitisation projects.