On February 26, 2015 life changed for Chance Coughenour, a doctoral candidateat the University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Photogrammetry (IfP). That was namely the day on which terrorist militias of the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) published a video on the Internet in which its fighters were shown destroying Iraq’s museum of Mossul,with its millenium-old statues. That act triggered a new method of preservation of cultures.
32-year-old Chance Coughenour sat at his computer until late that fateful night, communicating with a facebook-group of colleagues from the European Union’s‘Initial Training Network for Digital CulturalHeritage’ (ITN DCH) Project. Since October 2013, it has brought together 16 next-generation researchers in eight countries to study how to preserve the culturalheritage of humanity in digital form. ‘Why not use photos in order to reconstruct the statues virtually with photogrammetry and exhibit them in a virtual museum?’ wrote Matthew Vincent of the University of Murcia. Coughenour answered: ‘That would bea fabulous answer to IS: reconstructing anything they destroy.
Before they knew it, both were caught up in this project of their own making. Within two weeks, they had created from 16 photographs a three-dimensional reconstruction of the Lion of Mossul, plus an Internet website on which this statue was presented as the first exhibit of the virtual museum. International media like the major Spanish and French dailies ‘El Pais’ and ‘Le Monde’, along with the British broadcaster BBC reported about it. What started initially under the name ‘Project Mosul’ is now ‘Rekrei’. When translated from Esperanto, it means roughly ‘rebuild’. That’s important, because other cultural monuments elsewhere have also been caught on film. Coughenour’s original aim in carrying out his EU-project and writing his dissertation at the IfP was to work with automated 3D and 4D data acquisition using laser measurement and photogrammetry.
Contribution against barbarism
After finishing his Bachelor’s Degree in history at West Virginia University, the young American completed two Master’s Degree programs: one at the University of Leicester in England and a second one in Spain in virtual archeology. The latter also brought him to the IfP, because ‘Photogrammetry is very important for archeology and for our virtual heritage.’ To deepen this insight, he looked for an institute that can deal with the further development and digitalization of a technology invented in the 19th century in which the spatial form of an object can be reconstructed from photographs.
Before long, however, the ‘Rekrei’ project grew to such dimensions that it took up - and still takes up - most of Coughenour’s time. Speaking as a scientist, he says, ‘Rekrei gave us a way to set a small counterpoint to the barbarianism of the IS.’ His Internet platform does this by linking crowd-sourcing with photogrammetry: from anywhere in the world, anyone can upload photographs of historic monuments or process them into 3D models. From there, they are taken into the project via the 3D-platform ‘Sketchfab’. ‘This kind of 3D reconstruction has been made possible at all only through the immense popularity of digital cameras and mobile phone cameras,’ says Coughenour.
Even today, the two ‘Rekrei’ founders are solely dependent on donations for their project, since it is not part of their research for the ITN-DCH project. On the other hand, their work with ‘Rekrei’ to preserve mankind’s cultural heritage in the age of the Internet has led to an insight of central importance: the voluntary participation of persons all over the world is so overwhelming that there is no need to hire a team for gathering data. At the beginning, up to 100 emails a day came in, ‘including some from 3D artists who normally work on Hollywood films!’ At present, 364 persons are collaborating in ‘Rekrei’. This highlights the idea’s greatest advantage: no archeologist is needed on location in order to preserve a historic monument.
No original, but a good replica
Anyone looking to preserve such a piece of cultural heritage need only upload his photographs to rekrei.org, at which point others can then create the related animation. ‘3D models from crowd-sourced images may not match the original exactly,’ says Coughenour, ‘but if the original has been lost, we at least have a good reproduction of it.’ In fact, UNESCO has now included the ‘Rekrei’-reconstructions on its website reclaimhistory.org, as part of its campaign to preserve cultural heritages. Only as his dissertation neared completion did ‘Rekrei’ finally become part of Coughenour’s work at the IfP. As a result, for example, he now mentors students in their work, including one project to reconstruct the Temple of Palmyra, which was also destroyed.
Chance Coughenour and Matthew Vincent continue steadily today in their ongoing development of ‘Rekrei’. For example, they have created a tool which integrates all the relevant images from the ‘Flickr’ photo community after they are released for publication. ‘All the photographs we need are already on the Net,’ says Coughenour, now an expert for digital archeology and photogrammetry. He estimates that in only a few years automated software will be available for gathering photos for 3D objects. If so, it will not only enormously accelerate the digital preservation of world cultural heritage sites but will also be useful in other areas as well. For Coughenour, this means that both public and industrial funding sources should find it attractive to support projects like ‘Rekrei’. ‘Photogrammetry was invented in Germany, and it would be terrific if we could find funding here too!’ Daniel Völpel