Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning for the 3 D Reconstruction of Petra / Jordan

The use of 3D laser scanner in documenting heritage sites has increased significantely over the past few years. This is maily due to advances of such systems which allow for the fast and reliable generation of millions of 3D points. Despite the considerable progress of these approaches, the highest possible degree in efficiency and flexibility of data collection will be possible, if other techniques are combined during data processing. Within the paper the potential of combining terrestrial laser scanning and close range photogrammetry for the documentation of heritage sites is discussed. Besides improving the geometry of the model, the integration aims on supporting the visual quality of the linear features like edges and cracks in the historical scenes. Additionally, we present an effective approach for projective texture mapping from photographs onto triangulated surfaces from 3D laser scanning. By these means, the effort to generate photorealistic models of complex shaped objects can be reduced considerably. In order to handle the resulting problem of occlusions, the visibility of the model areas in the respective images has to be established. For this purpose an efficient algorithm addressing the image fusion and visibility is used. The investigations and implementation of the experiments are based on data from Al-Khasneh, a well-known monument in Petra, Jordan.