Hendrik Hameeuw

KU Leuven | ku leuven · University Library

Within the framework of the project " Tracing the presence of more prehistoric rock art sites, similar to the ones already discovered and studied by the Belgian team in this same region at Qurta and el-Hosh (Huyge et al 2007, 2011, 2012; Huyge 2009). This contribution focuses uniquely on a new component introduced to the 2014 mission: the developme...

A multispectral, multidirectional, portable and dome-shaped acquisition system is developed within the framework of the research projects RICH (KU Leuven) and EES (RMAH, Brussels) in collaboration with the ESAT-VISICS research group (KU Leuven). The Multispectral Portable Light Dome (MS PLD) consists of a hemispherical structure, an overhead camera...

This contribution presents insights into the ongoing evolution of new visualization techniques relevant for the fields of archaeology and, particularly, Assyriology. We focus on systems and methods facilitating the reading of texts and sealings impressed on clay tablets. Making high resolution 3D models of archaeological objects seems an attractive...

The Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH ) Near Eastern collections contain six large Seleucid bullae. These originate from the city of Warka (Uruk), where German archaeological teams began excavating in 1902, with systematic digging starting in 1912/1913 and lasting until 2002. Seleucid bullae were found in several rooms around the Bit Rēš sanct...

A rock art panel from the site of el-Hosh featuring two boats along with human depictions, including one with royal regalia, alongside a presumed captor with a Nubian captive, adds a further important example of early royal iconography in Egyptian rock art. This early royal representation stands alongside the well-known panels from Nag el-Hamdulab...

Analysis and scientific imaging of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Observations during restoration: The analytical research techniques and methods of scientific imaging carried out by the KIK-IRPA, IPARC and KU Leuven between 2016 and 2021 brought to light a highly detailed level of new information concerning the original composition of the picto...

Interactive Pixel Based file formats have been produced over the course of the last two decades by many stakeholders active in the Heritage sector. It is a global story. Its use has facilitated research and dissemination strategies for vast numbers of artefacts, conservation interactions and scientific studies. The technology has been explored and...

It is the goal of this project, A. to produce a sufficient number of different spectral measurements on a wide variety of historical paper, parchment/vellum, leather, inks, and pigments media, to fuel the above-sketched procedure. To accomplish this, objects from KU Leuven Libraries Special Collections have been used. In addition, a number of conte...

The View of the Strait of Messina (Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, KBR, Print Room), attributed to the circle of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was studied in detail in 2018 in the context of the Fingerprint Project. The drawing was examined with analytical and imaging techniques, combined with visual, microscopic and conservation assessment. Non-de...

The colorful images in medieval manuscripts have striking characteristics that need meticulous approaches during art technical research in situ, as no sampling is permitted. Visual inspections and images with the microscope can reveal details about techniques and layers of the miniature. In this experimental research we applied two complementary te...

Multi-light, single-camera imaging techniques like Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI, including PTM, HSH, and PCA-RBF) and the Portable Light Dome (PLD) have been used by cultural heritage scholars and collection curators extensively because of the extra interactive visual information that can be revealed on artefacts when compared to standar...

A. The objective of the KU Leuven NBMSI Metadata Standard, developed within the framework of the 3Pi project, is to define the required or relevant metadata elements and their parameters for image captures created with a photographic Narrow Band Multi-Spectral Imaging (NBMSI) technology. The determined and selected metadata fields provide informati...

Museums offer an ideal environment for informal cultural learning on heritage artifacts, where visitors get engaged in learning due to an intrinsic motivation. Sharing the museum space among visitors allows for collective learning experiences and socializing with each other. Museums aim to design and deploy Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) in order...

Artefacten van het oude Nabije Oosten kennen een grote vormvariatie en kunnen bovenal uiterst gedetailleerd uitgewerkt zijn, denk maar aan spijkerschrifttabletten of zegelafdrukken. Mainstream beeldvormingstechnieken zoals technische tekeningen of digitale fotografie zijn vaak ontoereikend om steeds alle en al zeker de meest fijne karakteristieken...

Since 1999 a Syro-Belgian excavation team led by Prof. Joachim Bretschneider (UGent) has been exploring the past of Tell Tweini (Ancient Gibala) on the coast of Syria. After eleven years of excavation on Field A adequate data has been uncovered, examined and interpreted to generate a standardized work on the subject of the site’s chronology. The ce...

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a virtuoso draughtsman of exceptional talent, who created enigmatic and complex compositions on paper throughout his career. In contrast to his paintings, his drawings have rarely been the focus of in-depth art-technical research.

Hiëratische inscripties op verwensingsbeeldjes (late Middenrijk) van de Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis in Brussel zijn amper leesbaar. Voor hun ontcijfering zet ten egyptologen innovat ieve beeldvormingstechnieken van de KU Leuven in.

The Egyptian collection of the RMAH comprises about one hundred figurines made of unbaked clay, bearing curses written in hieratic script. They represent captured enemies and were buried ritually in order to symbolically neutralise foreign and domestic enemies and general threats. The red and black pigments used to inscribe these four millennia old...

Meanings and values of built heritage vary from factual and explicit meanings which are relatively easy to present, to more tacit knowledge, which is typically more challenging to communicate due to its implicit and often abstract character. In this paper, we investigate how tangible interaction influences the communication of this tacit knowledge...

A collection of Prime Cultural Heritage artefacts consisting of Egyptian late Middle Kingdom figurines (c. 1850–1700 BCE), made of unfired clay and covered in inscriptions, is kept at the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH) in Brussels, Belgium. Several of these hieratic inscriptions curse enemies of the Egyptian state, including Canaanite, Nub...

Stone seals are composed of translucent minerals that reveal complex reflectance and florescence effects when exposed to light from multiple angles or spectral bands. Similarly, the reflective responses of metal coins vary significantly depending on their alloy. There can be far-reaching consequences when these common ancient Near Eastern artefacts...

Single-Camera Multi-Light scanning methods like Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and Portable Light Dome (PLD) are being widely used in the cultural heritage sector. Both technologies followed a long development track in collaboration with cultural heritage partners, resulting in matured technologies. In this short paper, we highlight recen...

Context is crucial for understanding meanings and values of heritage. Heritage artifacts from recently destroyed monuments are exhibited in various museums around the world; contextualizing those isolated heritage artifacts enables museums to communicate the architectural and spatial qualities of the original context to their visitors. With the rap...

In recent years more advanced imaging techniques have been introduced to study, document, curate and preserve our heritage. Pixel+ focuses on two of them: Reflectance Transformation Imaging/Polynomial Texture Mapping and the Portable Light Dome.

Producing relevant photographic records in collections with unique and often fragile heritage objects is a serious challenge. Combining both visual and analytic information into such images is a major asset. Over the last decade the development of the Leuven University Portable Light Dome (PLD) has produced numerous such complex datasets. Its outco...

Detail van daktegel RH91/VER/V9/2/6/91 met afdruk van hondenpoot – links: opmeetmodus in de PLD viewer, zie onder meer de verhoging aan de linkerkant van de blauwe profiellijn van het geselecteerde deel van het oppervlak; deze visualiseert de omhoog geduwde klei langs de zijkanten van de voetkussentjes van de poot; rechts: normals visualisatie. Fot...

http://www.belspo.be/belspo/brain-be/themes_project_nl.stm#pp2012 The Egyptian collection of the RMAH comprises about one hundred execration figurines made of unbaked clay, bearing curses written in hieratic script (a cursive writing system related to hieroglyphs) and dating to the Middle Kingdom (c. 1850 BC). These represent captured (foreign) en...

The representations of the Sasanian coins published in “Une collection de monnaies sassanides de billon, de cuivre et de plomb” by Rika Gyselen & Malek Iradj Mochiri are all based on images made with the so-called Portable Light Dome (PLD) system (Willems et al. 2005; Hameeuw & Willems 2011; Hameeuw 2011), a multi-light/directional reflectance tech...

A multispectral, multidirectional, portable and dome-shaped acquisition system is developed within the framework of the research projects RICH (KU Leuven) and EES (RMAH, Brussels) in collaboration with the ESAT-VISICS research group (KU Leuven). The Multispectral Portable Light Dome (MS PLD) consists of a hemispherical structure, an overhead camera...

Museums offer an ideal environment for informal cultural learning, particularly for young visitors by allowing them to see the different museum collections and to hear their related stories. Gamification accordingly is an approach that museums follow in order to provide edutainment experience and to attract children. However, most of gamification t...

When heritage objects are being transformed into digital representations, the loss of information is inevitable. The challenge lies in developing integrated systems able to minimize this loss and bring together as many different kinds of recordable characteristics as possible of one and the same object. This contribution presents an approach that c...

Report of the Egyptian Execration Statuettes (EES) Project of the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels

The execration figurines at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels were discovered in Saqqara in the 1920s. The collection comprises over a hundred figurines and three small rectangular coffins, all made of unfired clay and dating to the late Middle Kingdom. The figurines are covered with execration texts: hieratic inscriptions in red or...

Each built heritage artifact possesses multiple types of information, varying from simple, factual aspects to more complex qualitative and tacit qualities and values like the architectural symbolism of a monument. This paper investigates how tangible interaction can enable the communication of qualitative information of built heritage to lay visito...

3D model counting 250.000 faces, made with Photoscan, based on 92 NIKON D800 photographs

Multispectral Imaging, photometric stereo, conservation, mobile documentation, non-invasive techniques, art-technical studies

In de jaren ’80-’90 van de vorige eeuw wordt de Roeselaarse haven uitgebreid in oostelijke richting. Men legt ondermeer de Zwaaikom en het achterliggende industrieterrein langs de Kachtemsestraat en Zwaaikomstraat aan. Vrijwilligers van V.O.B.o.W. en de Werkgroep Archeologie Roeselare verrichtten er onder leiding van Jozef Goderis en Johan Termote...

3D model counting 728.000 faces, made with Photoscan, based on 273 NIKON D800 photographs

This article presents a set of 16 clay cones conserved in the Royal Museums of Art and History (RMAH). They entered the Ancient Near East collections of the museum through various pathways since the early 20th century. These cones, nails or pegs were once placed in the foundations or walls of prominent Mesopotamian structures. The inscriptions on t...

This contribution comments on the five building bricks, inscribed with cuneiform text, belonging to the Ancient Near Eastern section of the archaeological collections of the Leuven University (Belgium). These bricks date to the periods of Amar-Suen (c. 2046-2038 BC), Shalmaneser III (858-824 BC) and Ne-buchadnezzar II (605-562 BC) and are remnants...

Reflectance imaging has proven its value over the past decade. Thanks to this imaging technique cultural heritage artefacts can now be studied and presented in ways which were/are inconceivable with established digital photography. Research centres and users groups all over the world have experimented with the approach. Cuneiform studies in particu...

The Royal Museums of Art and History of Brussels (RMAH) boast a rich and world-renowned collection of glyptic material from the Ancient Near East. The collection consists of stamp and cylinder seals, seal impressions and sealings, originating from a broad range of cultures and dating from the beginning of their production down to the Roman period....

En 1968, la scission de l’Université Catholique de Louvain en deux entités juridiquement indépendantes (la Katholieke Universiteit Leuven et l’Université Catholique de Louvain) entraina par la même occasion la division de la collection d’antiquités du Musée Biblique de l’université, dans lequel des objets de l’ancienne Palestine étaient conservés....

De Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis (KMKG) bewaren een rijke en wereldvermaarde collectie van zegelmateriaal uit het Oude Nabije Oosten. De verzameling omvat stempel- en rolzegels, zegelafdrukken en verzegelingen, toebehorend aan zeer uiteenlopende culturen en daterend van het begin van hun productie tot aan de Romeinse periode. Ze illu...

The publication of two cuneiform texts - NP 46 & 47 - from the University of Leuven collection. NP 46 is a Middle Assyrian letter; NP 47 is a Neo Sumerian delivery document.

Binnen het huidige geprofessionaliseerde archeologische landschap in Vlaanderen en daarbuiten groeien de collecties roerend erfgoed explosief, en dat op een groot aantal verschillende locaties. Om de toegankelijkheid tot dit methodisch, wetenschappelijk opgegraven materiaal te optimaliseren is de publicatie ervan de meest aangewezen benadering. Maa...

Sedert 2009 zijn de V.O.B.o.W. en WAR actief met een archeologische prospectie met ingreep in de bodem op de site Roeselare-Oekene. De vergunning hiervoor werd toegekend door Ruimte & Erfgoed van de Vlaamse Overheid voor de periode 2009-2011. Aanleiding bij dit archeologisch onderzoek van de V.O.B.o.W.-WAR was de vondstmelding van een mammoettand o...