Data Acquisition for Cultural Heritage Navigation: Integration of Panoramic Imaging, Terrestrial Laser Scanning and Anaglyphs

In this paper some experiences about the integration of panoramic imaging and terrestrial laser scanning surveys are presented. The main goal is to produce documentation with metric information for the cultural heritage panoramic navigation; furthermore, a subordinate result is to use cheap and user-friendly 3-dimensional images for a wide range of applications like the custom navigation. Three historical sites were chosen: the main stairway of the Chancellor building at the Padua University, some ancient buildings in Venice, the Santo Sepolcro Church in Bologna. The panoramic photos acquisition is treated for all the three sites; in addition some image processing techniques are used to mosaic and to filter the raw data. The laser scanning survey is related to the Venice site using the 3D laser imaging sensor Riegl LMS-Z210 and the software Riscan Pro; the Sobel filter is used to produce detailed silhouettes and to perform edge extraction. About the Bologna site some point clouds acquired with the Leica HDS2500 3D laser scanner (re-branded Cyrax 2500 scanner) are presented with different acquisitions (point of view and resolution) in the Cyclone 5.1 environment. The creation of anaglyphs is performed for Padua and Bologna sites, using the Anabuilder software; some notes are drawn about the interpolation algorithms. The results are very useful for web-based animation purposes especially for recording indoor scenes using standard cameras for panoramic surveys, which have proven to be rather economical also in terms of computational effort.