Tactile exploration of paintings: An interactive procedure for the reconstruction of 2.5D models

Cultural heritage is often not accessible to visually impaired and blind people, hardly ever when dealing with two-dimensional artworks like, for instance, paintings. In fact, despite tactile reproductions of 3D works of art such as sculptures or architectural models are quite common, a real barrier between blind people and pictorial artworks still exists, obviously due to their intrinsic 2D format. The translation of paintings into bas-relieves is recognized to be one of the most effective ways for breaking down such a barrier, thus allowing a sensible improvement in blind people's accessibility to this kind of works of art. Moving from these considerations, in this work the authors want to provide a bird's eye view on a new methodology for the semi-automatic generation of tactile 3D models starting from paintings, in particular those characterized by single-point perspective. The proposed method relies on an interactive Computer-based modelling procedure, which is conceived to be simple and effective to use. The procedure, which has been implemented into a prototypal software package, has been effectively used to “translate” a set of paintings from the Italian Renaissance.