Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project (original) (raw)

5/11/05 - Two new papers, one describingthe entire project at a high level, and the other describingnew fragment matches we have found.

Overview of the project

The Forma Urbis Romae, also known as the Severan Marble Plan, is a giant marble map of ancient Rome. Measuring 60 feet wide by 45 feet high and dating to the reign of Septimius Severus (circa 200 A.D.), it is probably the single most important document on ancient Roman topography. Unfortunately, the map lies in fragments - 1,186 of them, and these fragments cover only a fraction of the original map surface. Piecing this jigsaw puzzle together has been one of the great unsolved problems of classical archaeology.

The fragments of the Forma Urbis present many clues to the would-be puzzle solver: the pattern of surface incisions, the 2D (and 3D) shapes of the border surfaces, the thickness and physical characteristics of the fragments, the direction of marble veining, matches to excavations in the modern city, and so on. Unfortunately, finding new fits among the fragments is difficult because they are large, heavy, and numerous. We believe that the best hope for piecing the map together lies in using computer shape matching algorithms to search for matches among the fractured side surfaces of the fragments. In order to test this idea, we need 3D geometric models of every fragment of the map. To obtain this data, during June of 1999 a team of faculty and students from Stanford University spent a month in Rome digitizing the shape and surface appearance of every known fragment of the map using laser scanners and digital color cameras. Our raw data consists of 8 billion polygons and 6 thousand color images, occupying 40 gigabytes.

The goals of the Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project are threefold: to assemble our raw range and color data into a set of 3D (polygon mesh) models and high-resolution (mosaiced) photographs - one for each of the 1,186 fragments of the map, to develop new shape matching algorithms that are suitable for finding fits between 3D models whose surfaces are defined by polygon meshes, and to use these algorithms to try solving the puzzle of the Forma Urbis Romae. Whether or not we succeed in solving the puzzle, one of the tangible results of this project will be a web-accessible relational database giving descriptions and bibliographic information about each fragment and including links to our 3D models and photographs.

This project is sponsored by theNational Science Foundationunder the name_Solving the Puzzle of the Forma Urbis Romae_. Some of the early work was funded under an NSFDigital Libraries Initiativepilot grant calledCreating Digital Archives of 3D Artworks. Other early funding came from Stanford University, Interval Research Corporation, the Paul G. Allen Foundation for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the City of Rome, and Pierluigi Zappacosta.

Current status of the project

As of June 2005, we have assembled 3D models for all of the fragments, representing about 8 billion polygons, we have built a database giving scholars full access to these models, and we have created a separate database that gives the general public viewing access to the models. Click here for a description of (and access to) these two databases.

Unfortunately, due to slight miscalibration of one of our laser scanners in Italy, we have high-resolution (0.25 mm) models for only about 800 of these fragments. For the remaining 400, we have a high-resolution model of the top (incised) surface and a low-resolution model (1-2 mm) of the full fragment. Although we no longer have funding to improve these models, we welcome proposals from any research group or institution that wishes to help us with this task. Since scanning large objects at high resolution will always yield datasets with slight calibration errors, developing principled methods for overcoming these errors would be worthwhile research, and good solutions would undoubtedly be publishable.

In addition, we have found about 20-40 matches between fragments of the map (depending on how many you believe). These matches are described in this paper, to appear in Bullettino Della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma in 2005. A description of the first match we found - in the Circus Maximus - is included in the second photographic essay below.

People

Recent papers about the project:

Fragments of the City: Stanford's Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project

David Koller, Jennifer Trimble, Tina Najbjerg,Natasha Gelfand,Marc Levoy

Proc. Third Williams Symposium on Classical Architecture, Journal of Roman Archaeology Suppl. 61, 2006.

Computer-aided Reconstruction and New Matches in the Forma Urbis Romae

David Koller andMarc Levoy

Proc. Formae Urbis Romae - Nuove Scoperte, Bullettino Della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma, 2005.

Protected Interactive 3D Graphics Via Remote Rendering

David Koller, Michael Turitzin,Marc Levoy,Marco Tarini, Giuseppe Croccia,Paolo Cignoni,Roberto Scopigno

Proc. SIGGRAPH 2004.

This is a paper about the ScanView system. We use this sytem in our public fragment database.
A shortened version of this paper was the cover article in the June 2005 issue of CACM.

Other available information

Publicity about the project

Photographic essays from the project
Scanning the Forma Urbis Romae 23 newly discovered fragmentsof the Forma Urbis Romae Carving and breaking theForma Aedificii Gatesensis Analyzing the fragmentsof the FAG
Includes pictures ofthe first match we found!
On a more personal note, here is a photographic essay by project co-director Marc Levoy, narrating a week he spent on an archaeological dig in the Roman Forum, getting down and dirty with the topography depicted on FUR fragment #018a.

**Copyright © 1999-2004**Natasha Gelfand, David Koller, Marc Levoy
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