Automatic Recognition and Digital Documentation of Cultural Heritage Hemispherical Domes using Images
This work addresses the need for faster and less resource-intensive digital documentation of cultural heritage sites, particularly for large-scale projects, though it is incremental as it builds on existing optical metrology techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of computationally cumbersome 3D point cloud processing for cultural heritage documentation by proposing a method using only two images to generate semantic digital models of hemispherical domes, achieving an accuracy of around 6mm and a 7x improvement in computation time compared to established methods.
Advancements in optical metrology has enabled documentation of dense 3D point clouds of cultural heritage sites. For large scale and continuous digital documentation, processing of dense 3D point clouds becomes computationally cumbersome, and often requires additional hardware for data management, increasing the time cost, and complexity of projects. To this end, this manuscript presents an original approach to generate fast and reliable semantic digital models of heritage hemispherical domes using only two images. New closed formulations were derived to establish the relationships between spheres and their projected ellipses onto images, which fostered the development of a new automatic framework for as-built generation of spheres. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated under both laboratory and real-world datasets. The results revealed that the proposed method achieved as-built modeling accuracy of around 6mm, while improving the computation time by a factor of 7, when compared to established point cloud processing methods.