Integration of landscape and city modeling : The pre-hispanic site Xochicalco

This paper describes how CyberCity Modeler is used in order to extract both the terrain and the man-made remains of a pre-hispanic site in Central Mexico, a task for which it was not intended originally. We take an oriented aerial stereomodel and measure the point clouds of all architectural structures and the Digital Terrain Model points in manual mode. The structuring of the objects is then performed automatically. This procedure ensures both high reliability and completeness of the models and a very fast production cycle. We will also address the integration of the different kind of data (vector and raster) and the use of such a hybrid 3D model for the purpose of visualization. Such computer-based photorealistic and geometrically precise 3D model constitutes a new and interesting tool for the archaeologist for analysis and representation.