A soft union based method for virtual restoration and 3D printing of cultural heritage objects

Recent improvements in 3D acquisition and shape processing methods lead to increased digitization of 3D Cultural Heritage (CH) objects. Beyond the mere digital archival of CH artifacts, there is an emerging research area dedicated to digital restoration of 3D Cultural Heritage artifacts. In particular several methods have been published recently that, from a digitized set of fragments, enable their reassembly or even the synthesis of missing or eroded parts. Usually the result of such methods is a set of aligned but disconnected parts. However, it is often desirable to produce a single, watertight mesh that can be easily 3D printed. We propose a method based on a volumetric soft union operation that can be used to combine such sets of aligned fragments to a single manifold mesh while producing smooth and plausible geometry at the seams. We assess its visual quality and efficiency in comparison to an adaption of the well-known Poisson Reconstruction method. Finally, we provide practical insights on printing the results produced by our method on digitized fragments of real CH objects.