Tactile 3D bas-relief from single-point perspective paintings: a computer based method

Visually impaired and blind people are more excluded from equal access to the world's visual culture, thus being often unable to achieve concrete benets of art education or to experience the life enhancing power of art. Despite the fact that all over the world several initiatives based on the interaction with sculptures and tactile three-dimensional reproductions or architectural aids on scale have been devised, a "sensory barrier" between blind people and pictorial artworks still exists, obviously due to their intrinsic 2D format. Translation of paintings into tactile models in the form of bas-reliefs is recognized to be one of the most eective ways for breaking down such a barrier, thus allowing a tangible improvement of the blind people's accessibility to artworks. In the recent years, computer aided technologies for automatic or semi-automatic translation of paintings into tactile models dramatically have been devised all over the world, thus improving blind people's accessibility to artworks. Inspired by some of these impressive works, this paper describes a user-driven methodology for the semi-automatic generation of tactile 3D models starting from paintings. Particularly devoted to the reconstruction of pictorial artworks characterized by single-point perspective, the proposed method relies on an interactive Computer-based modelling procedure. The method has been tested on two masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance period.