Saliency-driven 3D Reconstruction and Printing for Accessible Museums

Three-dimensional acquisition and reproduction technologies are often exploited in cultural heritage field for a variety of applications such as conservation, restoration, and dissemination. Another valuable use of 3D data is to make exhibitions more accessible to visitors with impairments, allowing them to fully experience and enjoy the acquired objects. In this short paper, we explore the accessibility inherently provided by 3D representations of real-world objects, with a particular focus on the quality of the models and 3D printing, as well as the presentation aspects. To this end, we propose to apply a state-of-the-art saliency-driven process, generating a fixation map that identifies the object's salient areas that need to be reproduced with a higher definition during the 3D printing to improve the object accessibility. We present a case-study involving the full process of 3D scanning and printing the Coats of Arms in Palazzo Bo (Padova, Italy) to make them accessible to visitors with visual impairment. We employed different scanning techniques and applied the attention mechanism on acquired data to obtain the object salient areas and drive the printing process accordingly. Preliminary tests involving some participant feedback reveal that printing the objects with a variable detail level allows the visitors to have a better understanding of the object as a whole and to appreciate the relevant details.