WP1 will span the whole duration of the project. It aims at (a) coordinating the joint efforts of the consortium during the execution of the project, (b) ensuring the smooth progress of the work plan and the fulfilment of the consortium’s contractual obligations, and (c) providing the necessary liaisons between the consortium, the EU and other consortia. During this WP, the RECOVER partners, under the guidance of the project coordinator, will ensure the effective execution of the project.

The goal of WP2 is the formal specification of (a) user requirements, (b) desired functionality of the RECOVER system, (c) software and hardware platforms to be employed by the system (d) interfaces between different components and integration planning (e) definition of the validation trials and (f) selection and acquisition of proper data that the developers will use as test input during the development phase.

WP2 is led by CHOL, a company with extensive experience in cultural heritage, to ensure that all further project developments will be in line with the real needs and sensitive particularities of the specific application domain. Moreover, all SME participants are expected to contribute to this effort. Special emphasis will be given to the tasks of selecting the sets of paintings on which the developed system will be applied and defining appropriate usage scenarios for the RECOVER system. In this process, the SMEs will also attempt to involve some of their collaborators so as to take as much as possible into account the cultural impact of the process of reconstruction, recreation and virtual elaboration of historical paintings, the evaluation of the potentiality of the RECOVER approach for the needs of communication of museums, selections of paintings to be included as application of RECOVER based on a careful evaluation of cultural requirements, etc.

The goal of this WP is the development of a library of tools for providing semi-automatic 3D reconstruction of perspective paintings. WP3 will capitalize upon recent advances in computational vision which have demonstrated that when supplied with some a priori knowledge regarding a structured man-made scene, vision-based single-view reconstruction techniques can be used to reconstruct its 3D model.

The goal of WP4 is to provide tools and methods for completing and fine-tuning the 3D reconstruction of a perspective painting, as this is provided by the system developed at WP3. In this context, the 3D model of the scene produced in WP3 will be refined, the original texture will be mapped on the 3D model and various objects of interest will be independently modeled in 3D. The developed tools will allow, among other things, the definition of depth layers and will facilitate various interactive editing operations, such as: manipulation of the parameters of the primitive shapes and 3D meshes (see WP3) comprising the scene structure, three-dimensional reconstruction of hidden parts or of sections of the space not visible in the painting; providing color and texture for the 3D reconstructed surfaces by extracting and extending the corresponding color and texture present in the painting; removing as far as possible the lighting effects from the painting’s texture to allow relighting of the reconstructed 3D scene; eliminating unwanted objects. Special attention will be paid to keeping the required amount of user input to a minimum. These 3D reconstruction features will be most probably obtained by enhancing a state of the art 3D modeling system via the design of ad hoc plug-ins, which will implement the innovative functionalities required.

In WP5, the integration of all the subsystems developed in WPs 3 and 4 will take place, according to the integration plan compiled during WP2. The goal is to provide a system that will function smoothly and in a seamless manner, allowing the flow of information between the constituent components. Within the integration phase, a number of verification tests will be carried out, aiming at accentuating potentially weak points of the overall architecture. This, in turn, will give the chance of fine-tuning of the overall system, before entering its full validation.

User friendliness of the developed prototype system is important to this WP. The prototype should be ergonomic, easy-to-use and should not call for extensive user training. Therefore, the goal is to provide a system that will enable a user to efficiently and intuitively provide the required 3D model of a painting. In this manner, a primary objective of RECOVER will be achieved: 3D reconstruction of a painting will no longer be a tedious and time-consuming process for experts but a simplified process that can be carried out by non-specialists.

Software validation examines whether a product is the right one for satisfying a set of user requirements while verification is concerned with determining if the product was developed correctly. Within the framework of RECOVER, verification issues are primarily dealt with in WP5 by the RTD developers. Validation is the goal of WP6, which will compare the developed prototype against the requirements specified in WP2. The conformance to the requirements of the functionality and performance of the prototype will be evaluated against the following general objectives:

• Correctness: The extent to which the prototype is fault free.
• Consistency: The extent to which the prototype is consistent within itself and with other products.
• Necessity: The extent to which everything in the prototype is necessary.
• Sufficiency: The extent to which the prototype is complete.
• Performance: The extent to which the prototype satisfies its performance requirements.

• Prototype Software Testing
• Requirements Tracing

During the project’s lifecycle, a market and customer analysis will be performed to understand and identify what are the applications and services that can generate interest and attract potential customers, in order to determine which applications and services and especially which features can conveniently enter the market first. An early definition of potential applications and services is required to support the project outcomes with market-driven considerations, in order to increase the chance that final project’s results will be successfully exploited commercially.

All consortium partners are committed in exploiting the results of the project. More specifically, based on the results of this project, the SME partners will try to integrate the developed technology in their standard products and services. At the same time, they will acquire access to state of the art technology in the field of IT services in the cultural sector. Finally, the partners providing technology in this project will promote RECOVER developments and, in addition, will identify alternative application areas in which the system could be used.

The final outcome of RECOVER will serve as an invaluable application system and, will therefore, significantly encourage activities of target communities, namely cultural communities, art museums, and museum on-site visitors from the relevant education and research establishments. Project achievements will be continuously disseminated to the target communities through newsletters, press releases and announcements of results in major conferences and events.