Digital Documentation of Heritage Objects on Non-Developable Surfaces

Abstract

The methods of raster, metric documentation of heritage objects with cylindrical or conical surfaces have been known and used for some time. Recently, most of created documentation is stored and shared through digital means. This paper presents new approach to generate on-demand documentation of the surfaces that cannot be projected without distortions. The paper presents both the concept and implementation. To test created method synthetic and real data was used. Synthetic data is an arbitrarily generated colour point cloud depicting ellipsoid. Known geometry, radiometry and distortions of the data were used for evaluation of the approach. Second data set consists of two point clouds, one collected from terrestrial laser scanner and one resulting from dense matching on images. The positive results of the research lead to conclusion that flexible data viewer would be very useful for specialists using documentation of the heritage objects in their work.