Rupe Magna Viewer is the interactive RTI viewer developed within 3DARCHEO, a use case of the
INFINITY
project (Horizon Europe, Grant No. 101233051). Coordinated by Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna,
INFINITY advances the management and ethical reuse of Cultural Heritage Digital Objects through AI and
Semantic Web technologies within the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.
3DARCHEO develops FAIR-compliant RTI workflows for the documentation of prehistoric rock art,
validated at Rupe Magna.
This dataset was produced during a fieldwork campaign carried out from 4 to 8 September 2025
at the Parco delle Incisioni Rupestri di Grosio-Grosotto,
located in Grosio (Sondrio, Valtellina), is the largest engraved
rock surface in the Alpine region [1]. Spanning 84 metres in length and 35 metres
in width, it preserves approximately 5,454 carvings produced between the late Neolithic
(4th millennium BCE) and the Iron Age (1st millennium BCE), including anthropomorphic,
zoomorphic, and geometric figures of exceptional archaeological significance [2, 3].
Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) is a computational photography technique
that captures a surface under multiple, precisely controlled lighting directions [4].
By fitting a mathematical reflectance model to each pixel, RTI enables interactive
re-lighting and reveals micro-topographic detail invisible under standard illumination —
making it particularly effective for documenting eroded or shallow engravings [5].
Datasets were processed using RTI-FLOW and RelightLab [6], and are visualised here
through OpenLIME (CNR-ISTI VCLAB) [7].
During the September 2025 field campaign, 40 RTI datasets were acquired across
six sectors of the rock surface using a custom-built portable dome (Ø 460 mm,
48 LEDs, 6 rings, Fujifilm X-S20). Eleven representative figures — among them
praying figures, warriors, goats, and geometric symbols — were selected for
this open dataset. All data are published as FAIR-compliant open resources in
accordance with the London Charter [8] and the ECCCH framework [9],
following the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management [10].
References
[1] A. Fossati. "La rupe magna e l'Arte rupestre in valtellina," in Rupe Magna. Grosio: Consorzio Parco, 1995, pp. 15–18.
[2] A. Arcà. "I numeri," in Rupe Magna. Grosio: Consorzio Parco, 1995, pp. 119–124.
[3] E. Marchi and E. Tognoni. "Disposizione delle scene e delle figure nei settori," in Rupe Magna. Grosio: Consorzio Parco, 1995, pp. 29–38.
[4] T. Malzbender et al. Enhancement of Shape Perception by Surface Reflectance Transformation. HP Tech. Rep. HPL-2000-38R1, 2000.
[5] T. Malzbender, D. Gelb, and H. Wolters. "Polynomial texture maps," in Proc. SIGGRAPH 2001. ACM, 2001, pp. 519–528.
[6] F. Ponchio. Relight: A RTI Library for Creating and Visualizing RTI. GitHub, cnr-isti-vclab/relight, 2025.
[7] F. Ponchio et al. "OpenLIME: An open and flexible web framework for relightable image models," in Proc. Eurographics Digital Heritage, 2025.
[8] H. Denard. "The London Charter for the Computer-Based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage," 2009.
[9] European Commission. The Cultural Heritage Cloud. research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu, 2025.
[10] M. D. Wilkinson et al. "The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship," Sci. Data, vol. 3, p. 160018, 2016.
