Event: DSRP Seminar - Mummies, tomography, and segmentation: The ASEMI Project
Date: Wednesday 15 January 2020
Time: 13:00
Venue: Communications Lab, Faculty of ICT (Room 1, Level 0, Block B)
Speaker: Marc Tanti
Ancient Egypt is known for mummifying pharaohs but did you know that they also mummified animals? In order to investigate this practice and the reasons behind it, archeologists at the ESRF use x-ray tomography in order to produce 3D scans of what is inside these mummies without destroying them. This results in a greyscale volume showing just the different densities of materials inside but it would be more useful to be able to recognise and highlight the different objects such as bones, textiles, and biological tissues, a process that takes months of manual work to do. The ASEMI project is a research-based project to use computer vision techniques to automatically segment these 3D volumes into different materials which should cut down the time required to analyse these mummies from a few months to a few days. This talk will go through the basics of animal mummies, tomography, and segmentation in an accessible way.