Many projects concerning the protection, conservation, restoration, and dissemination of cultural heritage are being carried out around the world due to its growing interest as a driving force of socio-economic development. The existence of reliable, digital three-dimensional (3D) models that allow for the planning and management of these projects in a remote and decentralized way is currently a growing necessity. There are many software tools to perform the modeling and complete three-dimensional documentation of the intervened monuments. However, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector has adopted the Building Information Modeling (BIM) standard over the last few decades due to the progress that has been made in its qualities and capabilities. The complex modeling of cultural heritage through commercial BIM software leads to the consideration of the concept of Heritage BIM (H-BIM), which pursues the modeling of architectural elements, according to artistic, historical, and constructive typologies. In addition, H-BIM is considered to be an emerging technology that enables us to understand, document, advertize, and virtually reconstruct the built heritage. This article is a review of the existing literature on H-BIM and its effective implementation in the cultural heritage sector, exploring the effectiveness and the usefulness of the different methodologies that were developed to model families of elements of interest.

A Review of Heritage Building Information Modeling (H-BIM)

Kinect for Windowsアプリを作ろう

3D printing: State of the art and future perspectives

Airborne and spaceborne remote sensing for archaeological and cultural heritage applications: A review of the century (1907–2017)

Metrological evaluation of Microsoft Kinect and Asus Xtion sensors

. Recent photogrammetric applications, based on dense image matching algorithms, allow to use not only images acquired by digital cameras, amateur or not, but also to recover the vast heritage of analogue photographs. This possibility opens up many possibilities in the use and enhancement of existing photos heritage. The research of the original figuration of old buildings, the virtual reconstruction of disappeared architectures and the study of urban development are some of the application areas that exploit the great cultural heritage of photography. Nevertheless there are some restrictions in the use of historical images for automatic reconstruction of buildings such as image quality, availability of camera parameters and ineffective geometry of image acquisition. These constrains are very hard to solve and it is difficult to discover good dataset in the case of terrestrial close range photogrammetry for the above reasons. Even the photographic archives of museums and superintendence, while retaining a wealth of documentation, have no dataset for a dense image matching approach. Compared to the vast collection of historical photos, the class of aerial photos meets both criteria stated above. In this paper historical aerial photographs are used with dense image matching algorithms to realize 3d models of a city in different years. The models can be used to study the urban development of the city and its changes through time. The application relates to the city centre of Verona, for which some time series of aerial photographs have been retrieved. The models obtained in this way allowed, right away, to observe the urban development of the city, the places of expansion and new urban areas. But a more interesting aspect emerged from the analytical comparison between models. The difference, as the Euclidean distance, between two models gives information about new buildings or demolitions. As considering accuracy it is necessary point out that the quality of final observations from model comparison depends on several aspects such as image quality, image scale and marker accuracy from cartography.

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4d city transformations by time series of aerial images

The synergy between Mantua Diocese, Direzione Regionale per i beni culturali e paesaggistici della Lombardia and Politecnico di Milano enabled the elaboration of a strategic conservation plan for some Mantova buildings of great significance to the city and to the owners: the planning of monitoring activities necessary to the conservation has experienced a further development as regards the structural aspects, after the earthquake, to improve performances vis-a-vis the updated seismic risk level. The collaboration between stakeholder bodies made it possible to systematise the resources needed to access available funds for scheduled conservation and innovative diagnostics over the last decade. The aim is to bring about the necessary conditions for an in depth examination of case studies pretty much representative of local building materials and techniques, for which to identify the best practices for conservation. The networks the bodies belong to permit the dissemination of the results achieved to a vast number of observers, stakeholders, owners, and other local bodies. The paper relates to the diagnostics part, including the innovative techniques employed alongside the more traditional and standardised ones, with a view to drawing up a program of checks and a plan of preventive actions, despite of a limited number of interventions. The monitoring measures and the inspections aim to mitigate some risk factors, among them the (up to now) advanced state of decay of some elements in the oldest buildings, whose maintenance would aggravate the conservation conditions, especially as regards decorated surfaces. Out of the analysed buildings, the case study herein described concerns the Basilica Concattedrale di Sant’Andrea Apostolo in Mantova, a mankind architectural heritage and, obviously, a city monument.

https://re.public.polimi.it/bitstream/11311/1157833/1/Fregonese2018_Article_MonitoringAsStrategyForPlanned.pdf

Monitoring as strategy for planned conservation: the case of Sant’Andrea in Mantova (Mantua)

The analysis and classification of seismic patterns, which are typically registered as digital signals, can be used to monitor and understand the underlying geophysical phenomena beneath the volcanoes. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the development of automated systems for labeling those signals according to a number of pre-defined volcanic, tectonic and environmental classes. The first and crucial stage in the design of such systems is the definition or adoption of an appropriate representation of the raw seismic signals, in such a way that the subsequent stage —classification— is made easier or more accurate. This paper describes and discusses the most common representations that have been applied in the literature on classification of seismic-volcanic signals; namely, time-frequency features and cepstral coefficients. A comparative study of them is performed in terms of two criteria: (i) the leave-one-out nearest neighbor error, which provides a parameterless measure of the discriminative representational power and (ii) a visual examination of the representational quality via a scatter plot of the best three selected features.

/pdf/a-comparison-between-time-frequency-and-cepstral-feature-25h510eqpp.pdf

A Comparison between Time-Frequency and Cepstral Feature Representations for the Classification of Seismic-Volcanic Signals

Advanced 3D survey technologies, such as Digital Photogrammetry (imaged based) and Laser Scanner, are nowadays widely used in Cultural Heritage and Archaeological fields. The present paper describes the investigations realized by the Laboratory Hesutech of the Polytechnic of Milan in cooperation with the Superintendence Archaeology Campania in order to examine the potentiality of Image Based Modeling (IBM) systems applied to the archaeological field for advanced documentation purposes. Besides the 3D model production workflow in an uncommon excavation environment, a special consideration about the reached accuracy will be discussed. In the first part of the research, a comparison between photogrammetric camera parameters obtained with IBM systems and the ones provided with the calibration certificate by the manufacturer of the camera is performed. In the second part of the research, the operational phases of the application of such advanced 3D survey technologies are shown. The test field is the archaeological excavation area for the construction of the new “Municipio” underground station in Naples. Due to its position in one of the historical area of the city, its construction coexists with the archaeological excavations and it is strictly tied to their evolution. In such conditions, the need to reduce as much as possible the time to build the public infrastructure is a very relevant feature together with the ability to produce accurate documentation of what is considered archaeologically important.

/pdf/3d-survey-technologies-investigations-on-accuracy-and-4699yy0456.pdf

3D survey technologies: investigations on accuracy and usability in archaeology. The case study of the new “Municipio” underground station in Naples.

Etruscanning is a project founded by the European Commission and it focuses on the investigation of new digitization and presentation techniques, in order to re-create the original context of the Etruscan graves. Several digital techniques have been applied for the stages of digitization, virtual restoration and reconstruction and communication. The possibility of working on two different tombs allows us to deep two specific approaches and to diversify the final real-time applications. This project represents an interesting opportunity to create a concrete link between research and communication in the field of virtual museums, testing the effective impact in terms of cultural transmission, learning and appreciation both in nonlinear narrative plots conception and in novel metaphors of interaction. From a technological point of view the most innovative result of the project is the implementation of natural interaction interfaces, allowing the public to move and interact with objects inside the virtual environment.

Andrea Adami

Papers

4d city transformations by time series of aerial images

Monitoring as strategy for planned conservation: the case of Sant’Andrea in Mantova (Mantua)

A Comparison between Time-Frequency and Cepstral Feature Representations for the Classification of Seismic-Volcanic Signals

3D survey technologies: investigations on accuracy and usability in archaeology. The case study of the new “Municipio” underground station in Naples.

Digital Techniques for Etruscan Graves: the Etruscanning Project