SPEAKER: DR.  TOM MALZBENDER
HP Laboratories                                                                                                          Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

TOPIC: Reflectance Imaging: Relighting the Antikythera Mechanism

TIME:      7:30 p.m.
WHERE:  The CSM Planetarium.

In 1900 sponge divers off an island in Greece were seeking refuge from a storm when they stumbled across a magnificent ancient shipwreck. Among the wealth of bronze and marble statues recovered from the wreck was a lump of clay and mud that failed to attract much attention. Eventually it was noticed that this lump had many bronze gears embedded in it.

This lump is now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical computer built by the ancient Greeks around 140 BCE. It is believed to have predicted the location of at least the sun and moon in the sky, as well as lunar and solar eclipses. Nothing of comparable complexity is known to be fabricated by man for another 1000 years.

Recently we applied our technique of reflectance imaging to the surface of the mechanism, to assist in the process of reading inscriptions and seeing surface detail. This simple technique involves photographing the object under varying lighting conditions, but from a fixed perspective. From these images, per-pixel estimates of surface normals can be made, which can be used to relight the object with improved reflectance characteristics. More info and a demo is available by clicking here.

Tom Malzbender is a senior research scientist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and member of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project. His research interest lie at the intersection of computer graphics, signal processing and computer vision. He has developed the methods of fourier volume rendering, polynomial texture mapping, reflectance imaging and opacity-weighted volume resampling.  Click here for more information about Tom.