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 co-registration of a detailed and accurate single 3d model of the temple interior and exterior.
Highlights
The Syrian City of Palmyra, located ca. 250km North-East of Damascus contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world
Standing at the crossroads of several civilizations, Palmyra was an established caravan oasis when it came under Roman control in the mid-first century AD as part of the Roman province of Syria
The results of the image-based reconstruction of the Bel Temple using a combination of public domain touristic imagery and professional panoramic imagery are shown in Figures 13 and 14
Summary
The Syrian City of Palmyra, located ca. 250km North-East of Damascus contains the monumental ruins of a great city that was one of the most important cultural centres of the ancient world. Over the last few years, a number of projects have been investigating the use of public domain imagery in the reconstruction of collapsed or destroyed cultural heritage sites such as the City of Bam (Futragoon et al, 2010; Kitamoto et al, 2011). These efforts largely relied on combinations of aerial and terrestrial imagery and on a semi-automatic reconstruction process, limiting the metric accuracy and the level of detail of the resulting reconstructions. We introduce spherical photogrammetry serving as a virtual topographic survey for georeferencing the entire model
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