The development of GIS to aid conservation of architectural and archaeological sites using digital terrestrial photogrammetry

This thesis is concerned with the creation and implementation of an Architectural/Archaeological information System (A/AIS) by integrating digital terrestrial photogrammetry and CAD facilities as applicable to the requirements of architects, archaeologists and civil engineers. Architects and archaeologists are involved with the measurement, analysis and recording of the historical buildings and monuments. Hard-copy photogrammetric methods supporting such analyses and documentation are well established. But the requirement to interpret, classify and quantitatively process photographs can be time consuming. Also, they have limited application and cannot be re-examined if the information desired is not directly presented and a much more challenging extraction of 3-D coordinates than in a digital photogrammetric environment. The A/AIS has been developed to the point that it can provide a precise and reliable technique for non-contact 3-D measurements. The speed of on-line data acquisition, high degree of automation and adaptability has made this technique a powerful measurement tool with a great number of applications for architectural or archaeological sites. The designed tool (A/AIS) has been successful in producing the expected results in tasks examined for St. Avit Senieur Abbey in France, Strome Castle in Scotland, Gilbert Scott Building of Glasgow University, Hunter Memorial in Glasgow University and Anobanini Rock in Iran. The goals of this research were: to extract, using digital photogrammetric digitising, 3-D coordinates of architectural/archaeological features, to identify an appropriate 3-D model, to import 3-D points/lines into an appropriate 3-D modeller, to generate 3-D objects. to design and implement a prototype architectural Information System using the above 3-D model, to compare this approach to traditional approaches of measuring and archiving required information. An assessment of the contribution of digital photogrammetry, GIS and CAD to the surveying, conservation, recording and documentation of historical buildings and cultural monuments include digital rectification and restitution, feature extraction for the creation of 3-D digital models and the computer visualisation are the focus of this research