Digital recording of aboriginal rock art

A technique to digitally document and thereby permanently preserve prehistoric rock art has been developed. Laser scanning and texture mapping from digital images were used. Methods involving texture mapping require the exact relationships between the image and geometrical sensors. For geological structures, such as caves, the distinctive features required for registering the texture with the geometric model are difficult to find and extract. The developed technique combines a photogrammetric bundle adjustment and surveying observations to selected detail points to register the images with the scanner data, rather than searching for individual corresponding points. The technique is implemented and tested on Aboriginal paintings at the Baiame rock art cave in New South Wales, Australia. The result is an extremely realistic virtual tour of the cave and its important rock art.