Spherical Photogrammetry as Rescue Documentation for the Reconstruction of Some UNESCO Sites in Syria

Abstract

In summer 2010, during a study journey, Fangi has got to realize photographic coverage of some UNESCO sites of Syria, according to the technique of panoramic photography. Those shoots have become important as a result of the outbreak of civil war, as documents useful for documentation, survey, and for any possible restoration of the monuments damaged or destroyed by war. It 's the case of the millenary minaret of Aleppo. With the technique of spherical panoramic photogrammetry, developed by Fangi, it was possible to carry out a survey of quantities and the virtual reconstruction of the minaret. So it was also done for the other UNESCO documented monuments as the Roman theater of Bosra, the great mosque of the Umayyad in Damascus, and the walls of the citadel of Aleppo and finally the minaret of the great mosque in Aleppo. The detailed description of the project will be made in the work that will be presented in the next international conference UID (XXXV International Congress of Teachers of Representation) to be held in October in Matera, Italy, on Cultural Heritage Sites. The serious damage that the civil war has caused to the Syrian heritage make the documentation of these monuments by UNESCO a key element for their conservation, possible restoration and memory.

3D Sketching of the Fortified Entrance of the Citadel of Aleppo from a Few Sightseeing Photos

“…Figure 10). It should be interesting to compare the model we produced with more reliable models such as the one in [10]. Beyond the comparison of the resulting models, it should also be interesting to mix our approach with the previous works fully based on automatic reconstruction from photogrammetry.…”

“…Considering the recent events, the experiments of 3D digitizations and reconstructions of the Syrian architectural heritage are numerous. Several sites were digitally documented and reconstructed thanks to a photographic coverage of some UNESCO sites before the war through different projects, with various techniques such as spherical photogrammetry [10] [9], photogrammetry and laser scan [4]. After the beginning of war, several projects explored crowd-sourced methods to document and reconstruct the damaged or destroyed heritage.…”

Online Tribes and Digital Authority: What Can Social Theory Bring to Digital Archaeology?

“…The many forms of digital media formats and platforms now available for discussion and consumption have become the arena for public reception, perception, and discussion of archaeological topics, from the 3D reconstruction of the skeleton and burial of Richard III (Buckley et al 2013) or 'reconstruction' in digital form of Syrian antiquities destroyed by ISIL (Fangi et al 2013;Williams 2015), to the appropriate use of games and applications such as Pokemon Go in museums and at archaeological sites (Bade 2016;Cascalheira 2014). These are the locations where archaeology as a professional, scientific, and relevant discipline is encountered, discussed, and legitimised in the eyes of the general public.…”

The Legacy of Sycamore Gap: The Potential of Photogrammetric AI for Reverse Engineering Lost Heritage with Crowdsourced Data

“…Grün et al, 2004;Stathopoulou et al, 2015;Vincent et al, 2015;Fangi, 2015;Grussenmeyer and Al Khalil, 2017;Dhonju et al, 2018;Maiwald et al, 2021;Alsadik, 2022;Mazzacca et al, 2023). The main concept behind it is to leverage the popularity of heritage objects to garner sufficient images enabling photogrammetric methods (Bonacchi et al, 2014;Doulamis et al, 2020;Fangi et al, 2022;Jaud et al 2022;Shivottam et al, 2023). 3D reconstruction can support physical replicas on a small scale for valorization purposes and can also be used to bring lost objects back to life with augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) applications (Alkhatib et al, 2023).…”