Combining Public Domain and Professional Panoramic Imagery for the Accurate and Dense 3d Reconstruction of the Destroyed Bel Temple in Palmyra

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This paper exploits the potential of dense multi-image 3d reconstruction of destroyed cultural heritage monuments by either using public domain touristic imagery only or by combining the public domain imagery with professional panoramic imagery. The focus of our work is placed on the reconstruction of the temple of Bel, one of the Syrian heritage monuments, which was destroyed in September 2015 by the so called "Islamic State". The great temple of Bel is considered as one of the most important religious buildings of the 1st century AD in the East with a unique design. The investigations and the reconstruction were carried out using two types of imagery. The first are freely available generic touristic photos collected from the web. The second are panoramic images captured in 2010 for documenting those monuments. In the paper we present a 3d reconstruction workflow for both types of imagery using state-of-the art dense image matching software, addressing the non-trivial challenges of combining uncalibrated public domain imagery with panoramic images with very wide base-lines. We subsequently investigate the aspects of accuracy and completeness obtainable from the public domain touristic images alone and from the combination with spherical panoramas. We furthermore discuss the challenges of co-registering the weakly connected 3d point cloud fragments resulting from the limited coverage of the touristic photos. We then describe an approach using spherical photogrammetry as a virtual topographic survey allowing the coregistration of a detailed and accurate single 3d model of the temple interior and exterior.

Three Dimensional Reconstruction Workflows for Lost Cultural Heritage Monuments Exploiting Public Domain and Professional Photogrammetric Imagery

“…More recent work, e.g. by Wahbeh and Nebiker (2016), also quantitatively assessed the quality of the resulting 3d reconstructions. The authors also investigated image acquisition patterns by tourists for typical heritage monuments following earlier investigations at urban scales by Kádár & Gede (2013).…”

“…The authors also investigated image acquisition patterns by tourists for typical heritage monuments following earlier investigations at urban scales by Kádár & Gede (2013). Wahbeh and Nebiker (2016) identified some typical problems with open domain tourist images and with subsequent 3d reconstructions. These include: the presence of numerous uncalibrated cameras; large differences in image quality, resolution and lighting conditions; and very unevenly distributed image coverage.…”

“…Collection Professional and open-domain Photos; • Separating photos into groups based on their distribution and orientation patterns; • Processing the multi-view 3d reconstruction exploiting geometric constraints in case of the panoramic images (see Wahbeh & Nebiker, 2016) to produce different point clouds from different chunks;…”

Multitemporal 3d Modelling for Cultural Heritage Emergency During Seismic Events: Damage Assesment of S. Agostino Church in Amatrice (Ri)

“…http://heritagetogether.org/) was created to produce heritage data using the support of the local communities. Many other projects and experiences can be found in the literature (Stathopoulou et al, 2015;Bashar, 2016;Wahbeh, 2016).…”

The Return of the Siegesburg – 3d-Reconstruction of a Disappeared and Forgotten Monument

“…they were destroyed in the past and they are probably already forgotten. Examples for the meaningless destruction are among many others the Great Buddha statues from Bamiyan in Afghanistan (Gruen et al 2002), blown up in March 2001 by the Taliban, the Minaret of the Umayyad Mosque of the UNESCO heritage site of ancient city of Aleppo (Fangi & Wahbeh 2013), which was destroyed during the current Syrian civil war and the Great temple of Bel in the archaeological momentous site Palmyra in Syria (Wahbeh et al 2016), one of the most important Syrian heritage monuments, which was destroyed in September 2015 by the so called "Islamic State". These terrible destructions demonstrate clearly that metric documentation of (important) ancient monuments is an essential and very useful reference for a future reconstruction or restoration of those CH objects.…”