Special issue on 3D acquisition technology for cultural heritage

Computer Graphics has been used to aid in the study and presentation of Cultural Heritage for a long time now. Increasingly, also Computer Vision starts to play its role, as a matter of fact often in combination with graphics. This has lead the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) to create its Technical Committee 19 ‘Computer Vision for Cultural Heritage Applications’ (http://iapr-tc19.prip.tuwien.ac.at/), co-chaired by the editors of this special issue. About the same time, the creation of the European Network of Excellence EPOCH (Excellence in the Processing of Open Cultural Heritage – http://www.epoch-net.org) has given this specific domain of research an additional impetus in Europe, but also beyond. It therefore seemed timely to devote one or more special issues of Machine Vision and Applications to Cultural Heritage (CH). In this first issue, the reader finds papers describing several state-of-the-art 3D acquisition techniques, designed or at least selected for CH applications.