Reality-based 3D documentation of natural and cultural heritage sites—techniques, problems, and examples

Abstract

The importance of cultural and natural heritage documentation is well recognized at international level, and there is an increasing pressure to document and preserve heritage also digitally. The continuous development of new sensors, data capture methodologies, and multi-resolution 3D representations and the improvement of existing ones can contribute significantly to the 3D documentation, conservation, and digital presentation of heritages and to the growth of the research in this field. The article reviews some important documentation requirements and specifications, the actual 3D surveying and modeling techniques and methodologies with their limitations and potentialities as well some visualization issues involved in the heritage field. Some examples of world heritage sites 3D documentation are reported and discussed.

3D Point Clouds in Archaeology: Advances in Acquisition, Processing and Knowledge Integration Applied to Quasi-Planar Objects

“…3D digital exploration and investigations are a proven way to extract knowledge from field observations [13,14]. The completeness and representativity of the 3D data gathered by sensors are critical for such digitalization.…”

“…The literature gravitates around a controversial or diverging hypothesis which illustrates this reticence to adopt new technologies in remote sensing [14,16]. During an empirical recording of monuments or sites, measurements are taken (by hand), taking distances between characteristic points on the surface of the monument.…”

“…The rapidly growing interest for light aerial platforms such as UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) based solutions and software based on multi-view dense image matching [47,48] and structure from motion [49] swiftly provided with an alternative to active sensoring. Use cases for 3D archaeological and heritage reconstruction are found at the object scale through terrestrial surveys [4,14,50,51] and the local scale through light aerial platforms, making this technique a favourable way to obtain quick and colour balanced point clouds. Moreover, the cost and accessibility (hardware and software) of dense-image matching reconstruction workflows have allowed its spread in archaeological studies.…”

Evaluation of Low-Cost Terrestrial Photogrammetry for 3d Reconstruction of Complex Buildings

“…Many studies have explored different techniques for lowcost image based 3D documentation of cultural heritage (Boochs et al, 2007;Remondino, 2010). Reu et al (2013) recently tested a low-cost reconstruction approach to archaeological sites using Agisoft Photoscan.…”

Rpas and TLS Tecniques for Archaeological Survey: The Case Study of the Archaeological Site of Eraclea Minoa (Italy)

“…The choice of the best approach depends on required accuracy, object dimensions, location constraints, system's portability and usability, surface characteristics, working team experience, project's budget, final goal, etc. (Remondino & Rizzi, 2010). Today RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft System) and TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanning) survey are standard approach to produce high quality point cloud and 3D model in archaeological context with reduced execution times and great metric reliability.…”