A 3D Modeling and Measurement System for Cultural Heritage Preservation

Cultural Heritage reflects the human production, life style and environmental conditions of various historical periods. It exists as one of the major national carriers of national history and culture. In order to do better protection and utilization for these cultural heritages, a system of three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction and statistical measurement is proposed in this paper. The system solves the problems of cultural heritage's data storage, measurement and analysis. Firstly, for the high precision modeling and measurement problems, range data registration and integration algorithm used to achieve high precision 3D reconstruction. Secondly, multi-view stereo reconstruction method is used to solve the problem of rapid reconstruction by procedures such as the original image data pre-processing, camera calibration, point cloud modeling. At last, the artifacts' measure underlying database is established by calculating the measurements of the 3D model's surface. These measurements contain Euclidean distance between the points on the surface, geodesic distance between the points, normal and curvature in each point, superficial area of a region, volume of model's part and some other measurements. These measurements provide a basis for carrying out information mining of cultural heritage. The system has been applied to the applications of 3D modeling, data measurement of the Terracotta Warriors relics, Tibetan architecture and some other relics.