Image-based photorealistic 3D models for virtual museum exhibitions

A method of building three-dimensional virtual museum exhibitions with image-based models of artefacts is presented. Instead of creating highly complex 3D virtual reconstructions of artefacts, museums can use collections of images to create convincing visualisations of objects in 3D virtual galleries. Based on the images, quasi-3D VRML models of the artefacts are created. When displaying the artefact models, the relative positions and orientations of the model and the observer are used to automatically select the best visualization image. Practical showcase implementations demonstrate that the method is very efficient and provides highquality visual results.