The Dept of Spatial Information Sciences at Dublin Institute of Technology runs a student placement scheme for undergraduates to gain industry experience as part of their degree studies. The Survey / GIS section of the Discovery Programme tries to accommodate a student each year, introducing them to a variety of geomatics related tasks in an archaeological context. Student Lorna Kelly worked with the Discovery Programme for 9 weeks, starting in February 2011. A major part of her work was to further our research into high resolution object scanning, using our NextEngine HD triangulation scanner.

Two web articles have recently been posted - the Orthostat, Knockroe, and the Megalithic Art, Knowth showing the successful application of the scanner on large decorated stones. The challenge to Lorna was to test the NextEngine scanner on a range of smaller artefacts from the excavation at Tulsk and assess how it coped with a range of different objects types, producing a report into its capabilities.

Summarising the findings a wide variation in the quality of results was achieved. This appeared to be determined by factors such as the reflectivity, colour and shape of the objects, and in some cases no amount of adjustment of the scanner settings could achieve the desired quality of model.

This is just an initial investigation and we intend to follow this up with further testing and, if possible controlled comparison of different techniques on the same set of artefacts. Any comment or feedback would be welcome on both the technical aspects but also the usefulness of the end results.

A PDF version of the full report can be downloaded following the pdf link below the images.

 Artefact Scanning using NextEngine 3D scanner (1.17 MB)