ACQUIRE HIGH QUALITY MESHES OF SCALE MODELS FOR AN AUTOMATIC MODELLING PROCESS

Abstract. Urban scale models depicting whole towns such as the hundred-scale model collection known as plans-reliefs are a valuable source of information of cities and their surroundings. These physical representations of French strongholds from the 17th through the 19th century suffer from many problems that are, among other things, wear and tear or the lack of visibility and accessibility. A virtual collection would allow remote accessibility for visitors as well as history researchers. Moreover, it may also be linked to other digital collections and therefore, promote the collection to make people come to the museums to see the physical scale models. We also work on other physical town scale models like Epinal for which the scale is a bit higher.

In a first part, we define a protocol for acquiring 3D meshes of town scale models from both photogrammetric and scanning methods. Then we compare the results of both methods The photogrammetric protocol has been elaborated by choosing the most accurate software, 123DCatch, which asks for about 60 pictures, and defining the settings needed to obtain exploitable photographs. In the same way, we defined the devices and settings needed for the laser scan acquisition method. In a second part, we segment the 3D meshes in planes by using Geomagic, which has been chosen between several programs, for its accurate resulting geometry.