Abstract
In the context of cultural heritage, an accurate and comprehensive digital survey of a historical building is today essential in order to measure its geometry in detail for documentation or restoration purposes, for supporting special studies regarding materials and constructive characteristics, and finally for structural analysis. Some proven geomatic techniques, such as photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning, are increasingly used to survey buildings with different complexity and dimensions; one typical product is in form of point clouds. We developed a semi-automatic procedure to convert point clouds, acquired from laserscan or digital photogrammetry, to a filled volume model of the whole structure. The filled volume model, in a voxel format, can be useful for further analysis and also for the generation of a Finite Element Model (FEM) of the surveyed building. In this paper a new approach is presented with the aim to decrease operator intervention in the workflow and obtain a better description of the structure. In order to achieve this result a voxel model with variable resolution is produced. Different parameters are compared and different steps of the procedure are tested and validated in the case study of the North tower of the San Felice sul Panaro Fortress, a monumental historical building located in San Felice sul Panaro (Modena, Italy) that was hit by an earthquake in 2012.
Highlights
1.1 3D surveying of historical buildingsIn this paper we present an approach to efficiently process geometric information of complex objects, such as historical buildings with irregular geometry
One of the main problems in this phase is the presence of holes in the mesh, due to data missing in the point cloud for occlusions in the line of sight between the sensor and the surface to acquire; this problem is present for buildings damaged after disasters or in a serious state of decay
In our case study the new proposed approach was applied to a simple structural element with a vertical extension: the north tower of the San Felice sul Panaro Fortress
Summary
1.1 3D surveying of historical buildingsIn this paper we present an approach to efficiently process geometric information of complex objects, such as historical buildings with irregular geometry. A full three-dimensional acquisition of both exterior and interior of those buildings is nowadays common in the field of cultural heritage (Núñez Andrés and Buill Pozuelo, 2009; Guarnieri et al, 2013). These surveys along with other techniques allow to promote documentation and preservation operations and are critical to monitor the building after a particular accident, for example a natural disaster, or in general to support policies of maintenance and restoration (Arias et al, 2007). The presented procedure can process the acquired data available as a dense point cloud in order to deliver a numerical model suitable for a Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis for the building structure
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