Towards a System for Semantic Image-Based 3D Documentation of Archaeological Trenches

Archaeological trenches are mostly documented using 2D representations like hand-made or computeraided (CAD) drawings, photographs and rectified photographs. On the other hand computer vision techniques and range scanners become more and more popular for producing 3D models of archaeological sites. However, these models alone provide no information about the contained archaeological entities of the reconstructed trench. In this work, an algorithm is proposed which uses the semantics “encoded” in 2D CAD drawings to perform a semantic classification of 3D models. The result is a set of segments of the 3D model which corresponds to the semantic entities defined by the polygons in the drawing. Noise, misregistrations and ambiguities (due to the lower dimensionality of the CAD drawing) are dealt with by finding connected segments in the model based on surface normals.