Towards automatic modeling of 3D cultural heritage

Exporting methods and tools used in industrial areas, where the profits can justify high modeling costs, may only be a starting point for cultural heritage modeling, but not a sustainable solution in view of the economics of this application. A way to lower the costs is to automate the modeling procedure. This work presents a robust procedure for the automatic alignment of pairs of 3D views, the first problem encountered in the modeling pipeline. The results of this paper, originally conceived to address the costs issue of cultural heritage modeling, can be profitably exploited also in other modeling applications.