A DICOM-Inspired Metadata Architecture for Managing Multimodal Acquisitions in Cultural Heritage

Quantitative and qualitative analyses of cultural heritage (CH) assets need to interconnect individual pieces of information, including a variety of multimodal acquisitions, to form a holistic compounded view of studied objects. The need for joint acquisition brings with it the requirement for defining a protocol to store, structure and support the interoperability of the multisource data. In our work, we are performing multiple imaging studies in order to analyze the material, to monitor the behavior and to diagnose the status of CH objects. In particular, we employ, in addition to coarse 3D scanning, two high-resolution surface data capture techniques: reflectance transformation imaging and microprofilometry. Given this multivariate input, we have defined a hierarchical data organization, similar to the one used in the medical field by the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocol, that supports pre-alignment of local patches with respect to a global model. Furthermore, we have developed two supporting tools for multimodal data handling: one for metadata annotation and another one for image registration. In this work, we illustrate our approach and discuss its practical application in a case study on a real CH object – a bronze bas-relief.