Digital Hampi: Preserving Indian Cultural Heritage

398 Pages·2017·22.35 MB·English

by  Anupama Mallik

Anupama Mallik · Santanu Chaudhury
Vijay Chandru · Sharada Srinivasan
Editors
Digital Hampi:
Preserving
Indian Cultural
Heritage
Digital Hampi: Preserving Indian Cultural Heritage
Anupama Mallik Santanu Chaudhury
(cid:129)
Vijay Chandru Sharada Srinivasan
(cid:129)
Editors
Digital Hampi: Preserving
Indian Cultural Heritage
Technical Contribution from K.R. Murali Mohan,
Department of Science and Technology (DST)
123
Editors
Anupama Mallik VijayChandru
Department ofElectrical Engineering International Institute for Art, Culture and
Indian Institute of Technology,Hauz Khas Democracy
NewDelhi Bengaluru, Karnataka
India India
SantanuChaudhury Sharada Srinivasan
CSIR-CEERI, Pilani andDepartment of NationalInstituteofAdvancedStudies,IISc
Electrical Engineering Campus
Indian Institute of Technology,Hauz Khas Bengaluru, Karnataka
NewDelhi India
India
ISBN978-981-10-5737-3 ISBN978-981-10-5738-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5738-0
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Foreword
India is a nation with a rich heritage. Even after centuries of deterioration, its
historical sites bear several unique archaeological features and are major reposi-
toriesofculturalknowledgeandartefacts.Theinhabitantsofsuchsitesandpeople
livingaroundthemhavekeptaliveseverallivingtraditions.Yet,rapidurbanisation
anddevelopmentalactivitiesassociatedwithmoderntechnologythreatentoquickly
erode the rich legacy of past generation. However, at the same time, modern
technology has given us tools and techniques which can be harnessed for the
preservation of heritage for posterity. We are at the edge of a precipice since
‘heritage once lost is lost forever’. Even within another decade or two, our living
traditions will be significantly diminished. We must act today. This book is the
outcome of an attempt to bring alive the tangible and intangible heritage by 3D
digital recreation and use of virtual reality towards visualisation with an effective
and immersive communication and interaction.
DepartmentofScienceandTechnology(DST),GovernmentofIndia,supported
a team of scientists, art historians and cultural heritage scholars in different insti-
tutions around the country to lead this task of not only developing the required
technologies,butalsoapplyingthemtotheWorldHeritageSiteofHampi,asacase
study, with attempts at graphical, pictorial and digital reconstruction. These sci-
entists belong to the computer graphics and vision community. The heritage
practitioners and art historians involved had decades of experience in cultural
studies. In addition, experts in architectural design were roped in to lead the rep-
resentationsofrestoredandrecreatedheritage.Thebiggestchallengewasthatsuch
a team with diverse expertise had no experience of working together. DST had, in
thepast,workedonlywithscienceandtechnologypersonnel.Buttheneedandthe
opportunitieswereoverwhelming.Takingtogetherthepassionofthescientistsand
cultural experts who workedon this projectand thementoring andencouragement
of the DST’s programme monitoring committee, the project came together suc-
cessfully.Theoutcomewasthe‘MakingofDigitalHampi’,asanattempttobridge
culture and technology.
HampiisoneofthemostspectacularsitesinIndiawitharangeofreligiousand
secular architecture. Indian artistic and temple architectural traditions give us rare
v
vi Foreword
insights into design, construction, proportion and scale. The architecture of Hampi
and Dravidian temple styles forms an impeccable synergy between structural
innovation and architectural expression. Anegundi, the capital of the Vijayanagara
Empirefromthefourteenthtosixteenthcentury,boastsnotonlyofspectacularruins
butalsoofarichlivingtradition.ThegraniteruinsofHampihaveseveraldamaged
and broken sculptures. The murals and paintings are in various stages of deterio-
ration. But this did not deter the team. In fact, the team took it as an opportunity.
Starting with the acquisition of 3D data and followed by 3D scanning of the
remnants, they used existing tools and developed new ones to bring alive the
brokenstatuesandartefacts.Ratherthanattemptinganauthenticregenerationdown
to the minute detail, the focus was on filling-in or reconstruction of the damaged
and defaced region and cracks in heritage monuments with least reconstruction
errors and verifying scenarios using on-ground information. They have carried out
digital restoration and rendering of mural paintings offering interactive interfaces,
and created personalised virtual avatars using evolving haptic technology, both as
interaction proxies for real users and as virtual inhabitants for digitally recreated
worlds.
This volume is an outcome of this extensive work. It is a documentation of
diverse technologies that are available today for this purpose. But it is much more
than a book on technology. There is also a significant intangible heritage compo-
nent through the study of the present-day festivals and rituals and links with rep-
resentation in old murals, paintings and inscriptions. Hampi architecture has been
digitally interpreted for interaction and understanding by a common man and
enhanced with digital walk-throughs to bring alive the cultural heritage objects
throughvirtual touch. Templeelements havebeencapturedgraphically, pictorially
and digitally, in turn, making the whole digital experience navigational and par-
ticipatory to all users. Architectural and Social Life reconstructions of Bazaar
StreetsofHampiinVijayanagaraperiodhavebeenattempted.Theaspectsofdigital
renditionhavebeenbrought togetherwith iconographicandiconometric studies to
better document and enhance the understanding of Vijayanagara sculpture.
Finally,forthosewhoarefamiliarwiththesiteofHampi,itprovidesaceaseless
exercise of imagination. The project represents a successful endeavour to create a
digitalandculturalknowledgebankwithdigitalarchivesontheheritageofHampi,
whereby fresh data can be constantly updated by researchers, practitioners and the
broader public.
New Delhi, India Ashok Jhunjhunwala
Principal Advisor
Minister of Power and MNRE
Government of India
Professor IIT Madras (on sabbatical)
Preface
In the 1972 UNESCO convention on heritage, heritage was defined as “encom-
passing tangible and intangible, natural and cultural, movable and immovable and
documentaryassetsinheritedfromthepastandtransmittedtofuturegenerationsby
virtue of their irreplaceable value.” While to most citizens, heritage refers to
monumental remains of cultures, the concept of heritage has gradually been
expanded to embrace living culture and contemporary expressions. The World
HeritageSiteatHampi,recognizedbyUNESCO,isanoutstandingexampleofthe
austere and grandiose monuments of India.
Department of Science & Technology (DST) Govt. of India initiated the Indian
DigitalHeritage(IDH)ResearchProjectin2010withanaimtoextendthepowerof
digital technologies to digitally capture, preserve, and restore all forms of tangible
and intangible cultural and historical knowledge. While archiving and dissemi-
nating digital representations of heritage artefacts and cultural traditions, the
emerging multimedia technologies in computer vision and user interface design
wouldmakepossibleimmersiveexperiencesofheritageandpossiblyinspireyoung
citizenstoparticipateinsimilarprojectsaroundthecountry.Indiaisrichincultural
heritage with hundreds of important archaeological sites and rich traditions that
needtobedigitallypreserved.Therecentadvancesindigitaltechnologiesopenup
thepossibilityofcreatingrichdigitalrepresentationsoftheheritagesiteswhichcan
vii
viii Preface
be preserved for perusal by world citizenry for the foreseeable future. In addition,
digital restoration of damaged monuments, digitally conjured animations, and
augmented reality representations of social life of past eras are intriguing creative
possibilitiestoday.TheobjectiveofDSTwasalsotobuildcapacityinacademiato
createanalytictoolsforthearthistorians,architects,andotherscholarsinthestudy
of the heritage of India.
There was an early realization that the goals of the IDH project required teams
withcapacityinthe“bestinclass”digitaltechnologiesrangingfromlaserscanning,
3D printing to mature and novel Information and Communication Technologies to
cometogetherandworkshouldertoshoulderwithsocialscientistlikearthistorians,
archaeologists, architects, anthropologists, and digital humanities.
TheIDH projectwassuccessfulinitsmainobjective ofcreatinga newsynergy
between the art and science communities for developing new frameworks and
solutions to preserve heritage in digital space. The innovative techniques and
research outcomes of the IDH project are detailed in the various chapters of this
book. I am confident that this book will become an invaluable resource for sci-
entists, heritage scholars, culture historians and academicians, and indeed for
anyoneinterestedinlearningabouttheheritageofHampiandeffortsundertakenfor
its digital preservation. The technologies outlined here are replicable and scalable
for application in digital preservation of heritage artifacts anywhere in the world,
and I wish success to all such efforts in future.
New Delhi, India Prof. Ashutosh Sharma
Secretary, Department of Science and Technology
Ministry of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences
Government of India
Contents
Part I Introduction
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Santanu Chaudhury, Anupama Mallik, Vijay Chandru
and Sharada Srinivasan
Introducing Hampi: Insights from Literary
and Historical Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
S. Settar
Introducing Hampi: Landscapes and Legends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
George Michell
IDH Snippets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
P. Anandan, Vidya Natampally and Srinivasa Ranganathan
Part II Modeling and Representing Tangible Heritage
Making of Hampi—An Attempt to Bridge Culture
and Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Meera Natampally
Acquisition, Representation, Processing and Display
of Digital Heritage Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Prem Kalra, Subodh Kumar and Subhashis Banerjee
Robust Feature Matching for Architectural Scenes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Prashanth Balasubramanian, Vinay Kumar Verma,
Moitreya Chatterjee and Anurag Mittal
Recovering the 3D Geometry of Heritage Monuments
from Image Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Rajvi Shah, Aditya Deshpande, Anoop M. Namboodiri
and P. J. Narayanan
ix
x Contents
Realistic Walkthrough of Cultural Heritage Sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Uma Mudenagudi, Syed Altaf Ganihar and Shankar Setty
A Methodology to Reconstruct Large Damaged Regions
in Heritage Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
A. N. Rajagopalan, Pratyush Sahay and Subeesh Vasu
Part III Analysis and Digital Restoration of Artifacts
Vijayanagara Era Narasimha Bronzes and Sculpture:
Digital Iconometry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
SharadaSrinivasan,RajarshiSengupta,S.Padhmapriya,PraveenJohnson,
Uma Kritika, Srinivasa Ranganathan and Pallavi Thakur
Digitizing Hampi and Lepakshi Temple Ceiling Murals:
Towards Universal Access and Tangible Virtuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Uma V. Chandru, Namitha A. Kumar, C. S. Vijayashree
and Vijay Chandru
A Patch-Based Constrained Inpainting for Damaged
Mural Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Pulak Purkait, Mrinmoy Ghorai, Soumitra Samanta
and Bhabatosh Chanda
Automatic Detection and Inpainting of Defaced Regions
and Cracks in Heritage Monuments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Milind G. Padalkar and Manjunath V. Joshi
Processing of Historic Inscription Images. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Indu Sreedevi, Jayanthi Natarajan and Santanu Chaudhury
Part IV Archiving Intangibles: Social Life, Living Traditions
Architectural and Social Life Reconstructions of Bazaar
Streets of Hampi: Vijayanagara Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Mamata N. Rao
Creating Personalized Avatars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Jai Mashalkar and Parag Chaudhuri
Intangible Heritage of Vijayanagara: Vijayadashmi Tradition. . . . . . . . 299
Chaluvaraju
Part V Explorations with Digital Hampi
Mobile Visual Search for Digital Heritage Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Rohit Girdhar, Jayaguru Panda and C. V. Jawahar