3DHOG for geometric similarity measurement and retrieval for digital cultural heritage archives

With projects such as CultLab3D, 3D Digital preservation of cultural heritage will become more affordable and with this, the number of 3D-models representing scanned artefacts will dramatically increase. However, once mass digitization is possible, the subsequent bottleneck to overcome is the annotation of cultural heritage artefacts with provenance data. Current annotation tools are mostly based on textual input, eventually being able to link an artefact to documents, pictures, videos and only some tools already support 3D models. Therefore, we envisage the need to aid curators by allowing for fast, web-based, semi-automatic, 3D-centered annotation of artefacts with metadata. In this paper we give an overview of various technologies we are currently developing to address this issue. On one hand we want to store 3D models with similarity descriptors which are applicable independently of different 3D model quality levels of the same artefact. The goal is to retrieve and suggest to the curator metadata of already annotated similar artefacts for a new artefact to be annotated, so he can eventually reuse and adapt it to the current case. In addition we describe our web-based, 3D-centered annotation tool with meta- and object repositories supporting various databases and ontologies such as CIDOC-CRM.