Lidar remote sensing of the Parma Cathedral and Baptistery

Fluorescence lidar is a well known instrument that is mainly employed for the remote sensing of the Earth's surface. In recent years, IROE, in collaboration with other Italian and foreign institutions, carried out the first experiments on remote sensing of historical buildings using fluorescence lidar. The main part of these experiments deals with the remote monitoring of biodeteriogens and the lithological characteristics of the building materials. This paper describes the results of the field experiment carried out at the Parma Cathedral and Baptistery in September 2000. Two systems, the tripled Nd-YAG lidar of the Lund Institute of Technology and the XeCl lidar of the CNR-IROE, operated for one week, in order to test the possible applications of both fluorescence point measurement and fluorescence thematic imaging in the remote non-destructive monitoring of buildings. Apart from confirming the possibility of detecting biodeteriogens, for the first time in our knowledge the processing of the fluorescence data made possible the detection of restorations and the distinction between pigments having the same color.