Domitilla Catacomb Walkthrough – Dealing with more than 1 Billion Points

In this paper we would like to present our application for editing and visualizing huge point clouds. We also show how we used our application to build a model of the Domitilla Catacomb in Rome, which is the largest catacomb in Rome. It is an Early-Christian necropolis spanning 15 km of subterranean galleries. The catacomb contains tombs and community burials, where some of the tombs are painted. The catacomb was documented during 8 scan campaigns where range laser measurements were taken, and also color photos were taken. We used the data from these scan campaigns to build a model that consists of more than 1.2 billion points. After the model was built it is possible with our application to make interactive walkthroughs through the model. We describe the current state of our development of our system, because it is still workin-progress. At the moment we are already able to build, merge, edit, and visualize multiple point clouds with a size of up to 2 billion point samples per point cloud.