MUSICES-Musical Instrument Computed Tomography Examination Standard: Results of the measurements and guidelines derived therefrom

Digitalization of irreplaceable objects of cultural or historical significance (or both) is gaining permanently more importance as field of research. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum (GNM) in Nürnberg, Germany, and the Development Center for X-ray Technology (EZRT) of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS) in Fürth, Germany, were jointly working in the MUSICES project, addressing issues of fully 3D-digitization of historically important musical instruments. This project was funded by the German research association DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and ended in January 2018. The project partners drew up examination standards that, independent of the deployed devices and operating staff, are set to deliver a high-quality 3-D volume data sets representing the musical instrument. Plenty of representative examples carried out during the project ensure the applicability of the technical parameters. MUSICES has been dealing with testimonials of the manufacturing of musical instruments during the last five centuries. Starting in 2015 until 2017, more than 100 historically remarkable objects were digitized my means of fully 3-dimensional image acquisition with industrial X-ray CT. The CT measurements were performed at the EZRT site in Fürth, where X-ray systems with maximum radiation energies between 60 and 9,000 keV and spatial resolutions considerably below 100 μm are used for CT scanning, as well as means for dual-energy material analysis and algorithms for the correction, reconstruction, visualization and evaluation of image data. New methods were applied to optimize CT parameters via extended studies of simulated virtual data sets. The final report provides various checklists for preparation, transport, positioning, best practice for measurement of various classes of instruments (wood/metal/mixed/other resp. size and shape), an elaborate data base structure description for long term archiving and robust methods for image quality assessment.