Image-Based Empirical Information Acquisition, Scientific Reliability, and Long-Term Digital Preservation for the Natural Sciences and Cultural Heritage Mark Mudge, Tom Malzbender, Alan Chalmers, Roberto Scopigno, James Davis, Oliver Wang, Prabath Gunawardane, Michael Ashley, Martin Doerr, Alberto Proenca, João Barbosa Abstract The tools and standards of best practice adopted by natural science (NS) and cultural heritage (CH) professionals will determine the digital future of NS and CH digital imaging work. This tutorial discusses emerging digital technologies and explores issues influencing widespread adoption of digital practices for NS and CH. The tutorial explores a possible digital future for NS and CH through key concepts; adoption of digital surrogates, empirical (scientific) provenance, perpetual digital conservation, and ‘born archival’ semantic knowledge management. The tutorial discusses multiple image based technologies along with current research including; Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), Photometric Stereo, and new research in the next generation of multi-view RTI. This research involves extending stereo correspondence methods. These technologies permit generation of digital surrogates that can serve as trusted representations of ‘real world’ content. The tutorial explores how empirical provenance contributes to the reliability of digital surrogates, and how perpetual digital conservation can ensure that digital surrogates will be archived and available for future generations. The tutorial investigates the role of semantically based knowledge management strategies and their use in simplifying ease of use by natural science and CH professionals as well as long term preservation activities. The tutorial also investigates these emerging technologies’ potential to democratize digital technology, making digital tools and methods easy to adopt and make NS and CH materials widely available to diverse audiences. The tutorial concludes with hands- on demonstrations of image-based capture and processing methods and a practical problem solving Q&A with the audience. Keywords: Reflectance transformation imaging, polynomial texture mapping, empirical provenance, photometric stereo, stereo correspondence, photogrammetry, structured light, digital preservation, archiving, cultural heritage EUROGRAPHICS 2008/ M. Roussou and J. Leigh Tutorial 1. Introduction The tools and standards of best practice adopted by natural science (NS) and cultural heritage (CH) professionals will determine the scope and nature of future digital scholarship. We will explore issues that influence these adoption decisions and showcase examples of emerging digital technologies designed to remove the existing obstacles to widespread adoption of digital practices. 1.1 Sequence of Presentations Mark Mudge will begin by presenting an overview of the themes uniting the tutorial’s presentations. These themes will explore issues that influence technology adoption decisions made by NS and CH professionals. He will explore the advantages that can be realized when image- based empirical information acquisition is organized in conformance with the fundamental principles of the scientific method. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) will be featured as an example of an image-based technique that can be structured in this advantageous manner. Tom Malzbender will discuss the PTM representation and RTIs, including the advantages and limitations of the representation. He will review tools for building and viewing PTMs and basic approaches to their capture. He will offer several brief case studies including the Antikythera Mechanism and applications in paleontology, forensics, and art conservation. He will also present work using reflectance transformation techniques in combination with photometric stereo and a high speed video and lighting array to generate real time views of enhanced object surfaces. Alan Chalmers will discuss the use of RTI and spectrally measured historic light sources, such as oil and beeswax, to recreate authentic Byzantine environments and their impact on architectural mosaics, painted icons, and frescos. Roberto Scopigno will discuss large object RTI acquisition and present a practical, simple and robust method to acquire the spatially-varying illumination of a real-world scene. He will present an assessment of factors including the effects of light number and position influencing polynomial Texture mapping (PTM) normal accuracy.