ENHANCING CLOSE-UP IMAGE BASED 3D DIGITISATION WITH FOCUS STACKING

Abstract. The 3D digitisation of small artefacts is a very complicated procedure because of their complex morphological feature structures, concavities, rich decorations, high frequency of colour changes in texture, increased accuracy requirements etc. Image-based methods present a low cost, fast and effective alternative because laser scanning does not meet the accuracy requirements in general. A shallow Depth of Field (DoF) affects the image-based 3D reconstruction and especially the point matching procedure. This is visible not only in the total number of corresponding points but also in the resolution of the produced 3D model. The extension of the DoF is a very important task that should be incorporated in the data collection to attain a better quality of the image set and a better 3D model. An extension of the DoF can be achieved with many methods and especially with the use of the focus stacking technique. In this paper, the focus stacking technique was tested in a real-world experiment to digitise a museum artefact in 3D. The experiment conditions include the use of a full frame camera equipped with a normal lens (50mm), with the camera being placed close to the object. The artefact has already been digitised with a structured light system and that model served as the reference model in which 3D models were compared and the results were presented.