Application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for damage assessment of a cultural heritage monument

Abstract

Disaster is the immense disruption of growing affair of the world, whether it is natural or due to human factors. Earthquake is the most demolished natural disasters which affect mankind in all aspects. One of the censorious disputes after an earthquake is assessing the damage of the area for the salvage of humankind, civilization, and restoration of the loss. Cultural heritages are the ones which is significant to history, gregarious, architecture, and science, and arises the need to preserve. In the context of conservation of architecture and heritage application, geoinformatics system is the decisive and efficient tool for monitoring, detecting, and assessment of architectural health of any built heritage. UAV photogrammetry is one of the recent techniques in image based remote sensing to do these tasks because of its various advantages over Terrestrial Close-Range Photogrammetry (CRP), aerial photogrammetry, and sometimes over non-image-based techniques of remote sensing. This paper presents the post-earthquake damage assessment of “Sulamani Pagoda” from Bagan, Myanmar which is an ancient city of Myanmar with archaeological belt or zone of 13 km × 8 km area and settled in rustling earthquake zone. In the year 2016, on 24th August, a hefty earthquake hit central Myanmar and did extensive damage in Bagan where about 400 temples were eradicated, in which Myauk Guni (North Guni), and Sulamani temple were severely damaged. After the earthquake 15 m tall tower portion of Sulamani Pagoda was crushed through the top of the east passageway. Unwrapping and classification of the point cloud is used to discriminate the damaged portions of the Pagoda and also to analyse and quantify the amount of damage occurred on the architectural heritage site.