Shining new light on indistinguishable carvings

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Meeting Details
Speaker: Alistair Carty
Biography: Technical Director, Archaeoptics
Date: 19/04/05
Time: 20:00
Venue: LichfieldGarrick Studio
Description: A self-taught programmer from the heady days of the Sinclair ZX81, Alistair Carty is joint founder with his wife, Dr. Carolyn Sleith, of Archaeoptics Ltd., a state-of-the-art 3D laser scanning bureau in Glasgow. He has published books on computer topics, spoken at countless conferences and is regularly sought for consultancy on 3D laser scanning issues.

Archaeology is quite often concerned with discerning minute surface changes for conservation purposes or examining surfaces in almost microscopic detail to aid understanding of an artefact. 3D laser scanners are a powerful technology that non-destructively acquires very accurate and dense surface maps of objects of virtually any size. By coupling such scanners with a mixture of standard archaeological techniques and advanced visualisation algorithms, Archaeoptics have rewritten expectations on what can be done using 3D laser scanners to recover information from badly worn or damaged artefacts and larger scale contexts, such as earthworks in the landscape.

Alistair’s presentation will give an overview of the technology. This will be supported by many case studies from almost 700 projects undertaken by Archaeoptics in the last 5 years where information was recoverable using 3D laser scanners and some cases where any existing information was completely irrecoverable.

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