Multi-scale 3D modelling of damaged cultural sites: Use cases and image-based workflows

Abstract

The creation of 3D models of Cultural Heritage (CH) sites that have undergone a severe disaster due to a catastrophic incident (e.g., earthquake, explosion, terrorist attack) is of great importance for several use cases. Different actors, like Urban Search and Rescue crews, structural, civil and surveying engineers, people in charge of restoration plans, archaeologists, architects, reporters, television presenters and computer engineers, may exploit the 3D information in a different way. Hence, each of them needs models of different scales/levels of detail and under different time constraints. In this paper the need for multi-scale 3D models of severely damaged or collapsed CH sites is addressed and various use cases are discussed. Also, image-based workflows are established for creating multi-scale 3D products via UAV images of a damaged church due to an earthquake. The models of different scales require very different amounts of time for their generation and may be used for search and rescue, damage assessment, geometric documentation, planning of repair works and simple visualization.