3D survey and virtual reconstruction of archeological sites

• 3D reconstruction of ancient sites integrating metrical surveys with historical sources.
• Iteratively infer geometrical refinements on reconstruction hypotheses.
• Novel use of 3D data for archeological interpretation.

As demonstrated in several case studies 3D digital acquisition techniques may greatly help in documenting an archeological site and the related findings. Despite such information supports for the traditional analytical approach for hypothesizing the most probable interpretation of an archeological ruin, mainly focused on excavations and stratigraphic examination; an accurate reality-based representation may be also used as the starting point for creating a scientifically sound virtual reconstruction of the site, embedding historical information of different provenances.The aim of this paper is to describe this whole process step by step, focusing on the iterative feedback that can allow us to reach the best virtual reconstruction solutions, helping the archeologists to better focus their reasoning through a detailed visual representation, and the technological experts to avoid misleading details in the final virtual reconstruction. The methodology has been experimented on a group of Cham temples located at MySon, an UNESCO archeological area in central Vietnam.

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