Assessing the Quality of 3D Reconstruction in the Absence of Ground Truth: Application to a Multimodal Archaeological Dataset

Benjamin Coupry, Baptiste Brument, Antoine Laurent, Jean Mélou, Yvain Quéau, Jean-Denis Durou; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 3457-3466

This paper proposes a new dataset of archaeological artefacts for evaluating 3D reconstruction methods and questions the notion of ground truth. Indeed 3D reconstruction of archaeological objects can be carried out using either scanners or photographic methods. It turns out that multi-view stereo (MVS) faithfully reconstructs the overall shape of an object on a par with a hand-held scanner while calibrated photometric stereo (CPS) reveals relief details. The restitution of low- and high-frequencies is therefore the prerogative of distinct methods which indicates that the ground truth and the metric used for evaluation should be chosen in view of the target frequencies. This observation led us to combine MVS and CPS using MVS to calibrate the illumination used by CPS. We demonstrate on our dataset of archaeological objects that this original 3D reconstruction method indeed combines the advantages of MVS and CPS. Our proposed dataset can be accessed here: https://github.com/BenjaminCoupry/the-MAD-project.