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Volume: 34 | Article ID: VDA-409
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Digital reconstruction of Elmina Castle for mobile virtual reality via point-based detail transfer
  DOI :  10.2352/EI.2022.34.1.VDA-409  Published OnlineJanuary 2022
Abstract
Abstract

Reconstructing 3D models from large, dense point clouds is critical to enable Virtual Reality (VR) as a platform for entertainment, education, and heritage preservation. Existing 3D reconstruction systems inevitably make trade-offs between three conflicting goals: the efficiency of reconstruction (e.g., time and memory requirements), the visual quality of the constructed scene, and the rendering speed on the VR device. This paper proposes a reconstruction system that simultaneously meets all three goals. The key idea is to avoid the resource-demanding process of reconstructing a high-polygon mesh altogether. Instead, we propose to directly transfer details from the original point cloud to a low polygon mesh, which significantly reduces the reconstruction time and cost, preserves the scene details, and enables real-time rendering on mobile VR devices. While our technique is general, we demonstrate it in reconstructing cultural heritage sites. We for the first time digitally reconstruct the Elmina Castle, a UNESCO world heritage site at Ghana, from billions of laser-scanned points. The reconstruction process executes on low-end desktop systems without requiring high processing power, making it accessible to the broad community. The reconstructed scenes render on Oculus Go in 60 FPS, providing a real-time VR experience with high visual quality.

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  Cite this article 

Sifan Ye, Ting Wu, Michael Jarvis, Yuhao Zhu, "Digital reconstruction of Elmina Castle for mobile virtual reality via point-based detail transferin Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Visualization and Data Analysis,  2022,  pp 409-1 - 409-8,  https://doi.org/10.2352/EI.2022.34.1.VDA-409

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