Experiments using smartphone-based videogrammetry for low-cost cultural heritage documentation

Abstract

The rapid development of 3D scanning technology is a welcome progress in the field of tangible cultural heritage documentation. While active sensors such as handheld Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras and lidar have recently generated much hype, developments in low-cost imaging sensors have also seen long strides in recent decades. This paper aims to see the potential of videogrammetry for the purposes of heritage documentation. This technique has existed for decades, but we argue that when combined with modern smartphone sensors and proper photogrammetric processing workflow it may present an interesting low-cost solution for 3D scanning. Furthermore, the paper wishes to address the requirement for a certain geometric quality in heritage documentation and how the proposed method may fulfil them. For this reason, comparisons between the videogrammetric result and traditional DSLR close range photogrammetry will be described to determine its suitability for heritage documentation. Results show that using modern low-cost smartphone imaging sensors, a good compromise between geometric quality and overall cost in the context of cultural heritage recording is possible to achieve.