Integration of Three-Dimensional Digital Models and 3d Gis: The Documentation of the Medieval Burials of Amiternum (L’aquila, Italy)

Abstract

This paper illustrates the results of an experimentation carried out by a multi-disciplinary research group made up of researchers from ITC-CNR of L'Aquila and of archaeologists of the University of L'Aquila. The research project carried out by the team is based on the analysis of the archaeological heritage (in particular, the documentation of some burials found in the medieval site of <i>Amiternum</i>, near L'Aquila). This starts from methods based on digital photogrammetric restitution, based on Structure from Motion (SfM) algorithms, and the generation of photorealistic textures in order to manage, in a 3D GIS environment, complex archaeological and anthropological data. The choice of technology to use is often determined by the specific needs of the survey, the purpose of the project, the budget and experience of the researchers, and the geometric characteristics of the assets, rather than the precision to be achieved. For the survey of the archaeological excavation of the medieval site of <i>Amiternum</i>, it was decided to use digital photogrammetry given that the objective was to document, with a rapid survey compatible with the times of an archaeological excavation the phases of image acquisition, processing and post processing of the site model. Furthermore, thanks to the integration of two technologies, digital photogrammetry and GIS, and the undisputed improvement in the management of 3D data by the GIS, three-dimensionality, in archeology in general, has become an indispensable component for site interpretation and for the documentation of the data.

Ultra close-range digital photogrammetry in skeletal anthropology: A systematic review

“…The applicative studies mainly dealt with the documentation of skeletal findings [55,66,67], including their taphonomy [44,62]; the identification or comparison of anatomical features and trauma [8,58,63,68]; the use of three-dimensional printing techniques for communication and educational purposes [69]. Their focus was related to fossil remains within the human lineage until the early development of anatomically modern humans, hence falling into the field of Palaeoanthropology [12,57,63,69], prehistoric and historic samples [55,[59][60][61][62]66,67,70], or with contemporary skeletal remains [5,6,68,8,11,14,37,56,58,64,65].…”

“…Shooting. Sixteen studies [6,8,58,63,64,67,68,70,11,12,14,37,44,[55][56][57]-over 23 producing 3D models-specified the shooting protocol, while other studies provided fragmentary information ( Table 2).…”

“…Studies employed offline software packages, with a single exception in which a cloud-based environment was adopted, ReCap Photo (Autodesk Inc., USA) [69] (Table 3). Most authors used a commercial solution-mainly PhotoScan (Agisoft, Russia) [6,8,[60][61][62]67,70,11,12,14,37,44,55,57,59] or PhotoModeler (EOS Systems, Canada) [64,68]-while [75]) and MeshLab [56], or did not give any information [65]. Within the studies adopting discrete shooting sessions (Table 2), the alignment and merging of the partial meshes for 3D reconstruction was realised using MeshLab [56,70], PhotoScan [55,57], or CloudCompare [63].…”

“…Open-source software packages such as MeshLab [8,56,58,59,61,66,70] and CloudCompare [12,56,58,69] were the most used in many contexts. Some studies used commercial software for specific tasks: Photo-Scan [67]; Geomagic Studio [11], and Geomagic Wrap (3D Systems Inc., United States) [55,70].…”

“…PhotoModeler (EOS Systems, Canada) Commercial Processing Offline 3D reconstruction [64,68] GRAPHOS ( [72]) Open-source Offline 3D reconstruction [12,63] Patch-Based Multi-View Stereo ( [71]) -Offline 3D reconstruction [55,66] Bundler (Snavely, Noah) Open-source Offline 3D reconstruction (sparse point cloud generation) [66] PPT-GUI ( [75]) Open-source Offline 3D reconstruction (dense point cloud generation) [56] PhotoScan (AgiSoft, Russia) Commercial Postprocessing Offline 3D reconstruction [6,8,[60][61][62]67,70,11,12,14,37,44,55,57,59] Decimation, remeshing and hole filling [67]; Scaling [11,14] ReCap Photo (Autodesk Inc., United States)…”