Development of An Effective 3D Mapping Technique for Heritage Structures

Historical buildings and structures are important for a country and the world since they are the only living evidence of the engineering technology of mankind. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to protect and preserve them to safeguard the identity of the particular civilizations, retain their cultural significance, and ensure their accessibility to present and future generations. Since many historic structures are in a partially dilapidated state, to prevent further deterioration, it is essential to record their present status in structural engineering and building material aspects. This is typically a costly, time-demanding, unsafe, and challenging task. As a solution, 3D geomatics technologies, and UAV systems are now being used in the world to document existing structures, especially in difficult- to-access areas. This is also usually a high-cost task. In this research, an effective technique for generating structural information of an existing building or a similar structure to preserve the details or for duplicating as a true replica is developed. The developed solution is a remote-controllable custom-made drone system with a GoPro Hero 7 camera. Different types of structures were selected, and after running several test cases, the most suitable image-taking technique and the processing platform were identified. The effecting factors to the accuracy such as the number of images taken, and overlap percentage of images were identified and their optimum contribution detected. As a result, the proposed solution abled to yield a dimensional accuracy of 98.9 %. This study concludes that the developed effective solution is a valid alternative to high-cost 3D mapping techniques.