Museum curators and researchers who need to view historical artefacts or works of art in museums and galleries round the world will soon be able to do so without leaving their desks - thanks to a project being undertaken by computer scientists at Southampton University.

Known as "Sculpteur", it involves building an advanced database to store three-dimensional representations of museum artefacts and works of art, together with information, so they can be studied online.

Sculpteur is also developing software capable of retrieving individual 3-D images based on their content.

The university's IT Innovation Centre is investigating new ways of storing, retrieving and presenting 3-D models, image sequences and video recordings of artefacts, along with some 2-D images and written information.

"Most databases work on finding keywords to retrieve documents, records or images, but little work has been done on finding good retrieval techniques based on colours and forms of images," said Dr Dr Paul Lewis, from the Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia Group in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science.

"In a content-based retrieval system, you can use visual features such as the distributions of the colours or the textures in the images.

"You can present an image as a query and say: 'Find me more images like this one.'

"We can easily see what's in an image just by glancing at it, but all a computer sees initially is the colour of each of the pixels that make up the image.

"You have to tell the computer how to recognise different features, to establish when one image is similar to another or to try and identify if they contain similar things."

Around two-thirds of the three million euro cost of the project comes from the European Union, with the university receiving 800,000 euros over three years.

The museums involved are the Victoria and Albert and the National Gallery in London, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre's scientific centre in Paris and the Museum of Cherbourg.