Effective 3D digitization of archaeological artifacts for interactive virtual museum

This paper presents a set of results of an on-going research on digital 3D reproduction of medium and small size archaeological artifacts which is intended to support the elaboration of a virtual and interactive exhibition environment, and also to provide a scientifi c archive of highly accurate models for specialists. After a short illustration of the background project and its fi nalities, we present the data acquisition through triangulation-based laser scanning and the post-processing methods we used to face the challenge of obtaining a large number of reliable digital copies at reasonable costs and within a short time frame, giving an account of the most recurrent problematic issues of the established work-fl ow and how they were solved (the careful placing of the artifacts to be digitized so to achieve the best results, the cleaning operations in order to build a coherent single polygon mesh, how to deal with unavoidable missing parts or defected textures in the generated model, etc.).