Presentation in Mainz 2026: FAIR 3D HERITAGE
The 2026 conference FAIR 3D HERITAGE took place on 15–16th September in Mainz, Germany. Over three days, the program addressed the full lifecycle of 3D cultural heritage data, from documentation and metadata standardization to publication, preservation, and visualization.
Keynote lectures included "The Dream of the 'Critical Computer Visualization'" by Hubertus Günther and "From Sketchfab to Scholarship: The Case for Sustainable 3D Infrastructures" by Costas Papadopoulos. Paper sessions covered best practices in documentation, web-based 3D exploration and visualization, and publication infrastructures for long-term preservation, while accompanying workshops examined metadata guidelines for 3D cultural heritage and proposed a new charter for the scientific documentation of hypothetical 3D reconstructions.
We presented a poster on our metadata/paradata framework for UAV-based church documentation.
Our research assistant Ting-Jia Guo went to Mainz to give a presentation on her research, accompanied by Dr. Folke Obermark-Stiller. They form a new working group in our project to focus on the 3D reconstruction of churches and artworks.
Ting-Jia reports from the conference:
My poster, "Enhancing Transparency in 3D Reconstruction: An Integrated Metadata and Paradata Framework for Multimodal UAV Documentation," presents a framework for documenting the metadata and paradata behind UAV-based 3D reconstructions of cultural heritage churches.
By integrating multimodal UAV data, including multispectral and polarized imaging, we can reveal details invisible to standard RGB:
🔹 Biological growth on roof tiles
🔹 Inscriptions and relief details within stained glass
These insights will eventually be embedded into semantically enriched 3D church models.
Beyond my presentation, the conference offered great discussions on point cloud processing and ML-based classification, which provided valuable insights for my ongoing PhD research on the semantic segmentation of stained glass windows.
As my first conference as a PhD researcher, I’m grateful for such a welcoming and intellectually engaging environment. It was a fantastic opportunity to connect with researchers addressing heritage preservation from diverse angles.