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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's Distinguished Lecture, Documentary and Interview Symposium. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Tom Malzbender presenting his Google Tech Talk entitled Imaging the Antikythera Mechanism. Tom is a senior researcher at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories; this talk is about the Polynomial Texture Mapping algorithm he has developed, and about its applications to computer graphics, archeology, geology, forensics, the Antikythera mechanism, &c.
PTM allows one to see more of an object's surface texture detail, from a set of photographs (taken under changing light source location), than one can see from said photographs with the naked eye alone. Its applications range from the microscopic to the macroscopic, it's a technique you can use at home, the software is freely available, and the mathematics isn't even very difficult.
PTM algorithms can also be used to determine surface texture renderings from elevation maps. One can even use PTM to do smooth focus variation between a half-dozen images taken, in a fraction of a second, from a single position and with a single lighting situation, but across a range of focal lengths (if one has enough light plus film speed), a technology which one can imagine integrated into future digital cameras.
