14.12.2020
3D-Pitoti
Exploring a valuable part of European cultural heritage
PITOTI-3D was about preserving and exploring a valuable part of European cultural heritage.
©
FH St. Pölten/Markus Seidl
In many European countries, evidence of prehistoric cultures exists in the form of rock art. On the slopes of the Valcamonica valley, more than 50,000 petroglyphs were carved into the rock between 4000 BC and the Middle Ages. They are called Pitoti, which means "little dolls" in the local dialect, and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They depict hunting, dueling, and dancing scenes, as well as Europe's first map. Pitoti petroglyphs are three-dimensional because they were carved in stone. This third dimension had never before been recorded or studied in detail.
The goal of PITOTI-3D was to investigate the third dimension of the Pitoti petroglyphs.
This involved developing an affordable and portable multi-scale 3D scanning toolkit that enables high-resolution recording of the Pitoti figures in their natural context, as well as intelligent data processing technologies that enhance the scanned 3D data with classification, clustering, and retrieval techniques.