Digital preservation, documentation and analysis of paintings, monuments and large cultural heritage with infrared technology, digital cameras and range sensors

The digital documentation and 3D modelling of Cultural Heritage monuments and sites is receiving great attention in the last years. There is a large variety of technologies for 3D surveying purposes and generally a technique is chosen according to the project requirements, operator experience, budget and location constraints. Digital images and range sensors (laser scanner or stripe projection systems) are generally the most used technologies used to virtually reconstruct the whole geometry of the studied heritage. The combination of the two recording methods has demonstrated to be an efficient way of 3D modeling as no technique by itself is able to provide accurate 3D results in all the applications and in short time. Other data are becoming nowadays pretty common and important for a more deep documentation and investigation of heritages, i.e. image data coming from the light spectrum outside the visible range. In this work, we present how we derive geometric 3D models of heritage structures by means of close-range photogrammetry or range sensors while extra information acquired with infrared cameras are used for texture mapping purposes and other studies. Data obtained from all those instruments are registered and fused together for documentation reasons, historical studies, restoration plans and visualization purposes.