Digital archiving of an archaeological excavation site for multimedia display

Archiving of archaeological excavation sites with rich data, pictures and graphs has been required for long time. This paper introduces an effort to register 3D graphics data of an excavation site at the world famous Terra-Cotta Warriors and Horse Museum. The measured data including shapes and colors are processed for archaeology research, unearthed finds preservation, multimedia textbook and virtual museum. We developed a laser range finder to imaging local distinguished parts in the excavation site. By using image transformation and virtual reality interfaces, we combine local measured data to produce a global digital 3D graphics scene.