3D digital and physical reconstruction of a collapsed dome using sfm techniques from historical images

Abstract

The historical images preserved in archives and in private collections represent not only a valuable documentation of objects belonging to Cultural Heritage; sometimes they are the only remained evidence of destroyed assets of our past. In the last few years, the improvement of the technologies in the framework of photogrammetric vision and the implementations of new Structure-from-Motion (SfM) algorithms allow to extract metric information's from this kind of images in order to carry out a digital reconstruction of these lost masterpieces. The study presented in this paper aims to evaluate a SfM approach to perform the 3D reconstruction of a dome collapsed in 1971 by using historical images. The final goal is to provide not only a digital replica but also a physical reconstruction of a portion of the collapsed dome as a support for the recovered fragments of the fresco originally present on the surface of the dome.