Christian SEITZ
(Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, Heidelberg University, Germany)
Keywords: UAVs, archaeological documentation, aerial imagery, structure-from-motion, stereovision
Abstract:
One important feature of archaeological documentation is photography. It becomes necessary in several situations to document an excavation from a higher point of view. In this case ladders or bucket-trucks are usually used, but in most cases the areas are too large for a good overview image.
With the project ArchEye, we wanted to improve this void. The basic idea is to use an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), in this case a quadrocopter, to create photo mosaics which are combined to high-resolution orthogonal images of excavation areas. We started the project in 2009 as a student’s practical at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University. Our first UAV was a quadrocopter, which was used until 2012 at several places from Germany to Cambodia. We developed a software-framework for the calculation of trajectories over the excavation, considering the camera, lens and using the altitude to adjust the resulting image resolution. This software is still developed and improved, yet away from completeness. In the later phase of the project, still along graduation, we were able to use Photogrammetry, in this case Structure-from-Motion (SfM), to calculate 3-D models using the UAV.
In the follow-up PhD-project ArchEyeAutomatic (AEA) we are now developing new methods for automated documentation of historic monuments in 3-D. For this approach we use stereovision and combine methods from Robotics, Computer Vision and Scientific Computing. The achieved quality and resolution fulfill the demands for building research questions. Two new UAVs are used, a large octocopter and a hexacopter.
In the talk, we will give an overview ArchEye with some of the results from different places and objects as well as the ideas and the current status of ArchEyeAutomatic.