XRculture at ISPRS Congress 2026

The XXV ISPRS Congress 2026, entitled From Imagery to Understanding, took place in Toronto from 4 to 11 July 2026. Bringing together researchers and professionals working in photogrammetry, remote sensing, and spatial information sciences, the congress provided an opportunity to present and discuss the latest developments in 3D reconstruction, geospatial technologies, image-based methodologies, and spatial data interpretation.

XRculture contributed to the congress by presenting the paper “Modelling Transparent Surfaces in Heritage Artefacts with Gaussian Splatting”, on 7 July 2026. This study examined the application of Gaussian Splatting for 3D digitisation of transparent and reflective artefacts in museums, particularly archaeological glass objects, which are challenging to capture using traditional photogrammetric and scanning methods. The paper presented a dedicated acquisition and processing workflow, and evaluated the visual and geometric quality of the resulting models. It highlighted the potential of Gaussian Splatting for highly realistic visualisation, as well as the current trade-off between visual fidelity and geometric reliability.

Bibliographic reference:

Medici, M., Sterpin, A., Settimo, S., Bevilacqua, M., Bertolasi, G., Rigon, S., Farella, E. M., and Remondino, F.: Modelling Transparent Surfaces in Heritage Artefacts with Gaussian Splatting, Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., XLIX-B2-2026, 869–876, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-869-2026, 2026.

Paper download link.

The audience responded very enthusiastically to the research and its potential impact on the digitisation of objects made from non-collaborative materials. This interest was reflected in the questions they asked about the equipment and software used, how the acquisition setup was configured in relation to the lighting conditions, and how reliable and geometrically accurate the resulting reconstructions were.