EVALUATING SMARTPHONES COLOR FIDELITY AND METRIC ACCURACY FOR THE 3D DOCUMENTATION OF SMALL ARTIFACTS

Smartphone camera technology has made significant improvements of sensors quality and software camera performance in recent years. Devices as Apple iPhone X and the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, allow to reach levels of image resolution, sharpness and color accuracy very close to prosumer SLR cameras, enabling also on-the-fly processing and procedures which were considered impossible to achieve until a few years ago. Starting from these premises, a series of issues and opportunities concerning smartphone application to artifacts documentation will be discussed. In particular, consistency and reliability of both shape and color representation achievable for small-medium artifacts belonging to exhibitions and museum collections. A low-cost, easy-to-use workflow based on low-cost widespread devices will be compared to consolidated digitization pipelines. The contribution focus is based on color accuracy of textured models achievable through smartphones by means of an internally developed application for the achievement of highly reliable developments of raw formats (.DNG) from Apple iPhone X. Color consistency will be calculated in terms of the mean camera chroma relative to the mean ideal chroma in the CIE color metric (Delta F*(00)) as defined in 2000 by the CIE on the CIEXYZ chromaticity diagram.