Data Fusion for Cultural Heritage Documentation: from the Panoramic Imaging to 3D Laser Scanning

In this paper some experiences about the data fusion for cultural heritage documentation are presented. The goal is the production of metric documentation for immersive and three-dimensional navigation. The resulting products are also very useful for web-based animation purposes. The main stairway of the Chancellor building at the Padua University was chosen as test site and some different methodologies were applied to realise navigable products. Traditional surveys and historical analysis are performed to document the main stairway from Gio Ponti also in terms of differences between the project and the realisation itself. The panoramic photos acquisition is used whit some image processing techniques to mosaic and to filter the raw data. Different software is used to test different interpolation algorithms also in terms of computational effort. The anaglyphs are created for this site. The laser scanning survey is performed using the Leica HDS2500 3D laser scanner (re-branded Cyrax 2500 scanner). Some acquired point clouds are presented whit different acquisition parameters (point of view and resolution) in the Cyclone 5.1 and Reconstructure environment. Furthermore, algorithms coming from image processing, like the Sobel filter, are applied to produce detailed silhouettes and perform edge extraction.