Evaluation Of Mass Market Devices For The Documentation Of The Cultural Heritage

Abstract. The cultural and artistic heritage has always been at the center of activities aimed at its preservation and enhancement. Italy is a country particularly rich in terms of heritage to be protected, where the high-risk due to natural hazard, as earthquakes, landslides and floods, which are adds to human activities, contribute to make the heritage more frail, land needs to be safeguarded and enhanced and new mass market technology can be considered as innovative tools for the documentation of cultural heritage.

In order to increase our country on the artistic point of view, it must be known in an historical and cultural way. Moreover, it is important also to define the cultural heritage on metric terms, to be able to describe and represent it with the best approach, with the purpose to offer to the people who comes to visit our beautiful country, the reliable model of some important object, that is no longer in exposition.

The possibility to use the mass-market devices can allow us to realize it, because they are available for the greater part of the visitors, in a photogrammetric way to reconstruct our models.

In the last years, these devices have been very improved and the embedded sensors are becoming more and more efficient in terms of precision and reliability. Also several small video cameras are now used to document our travels and activities and to share them through Internet.

In this scenario, the aim of this research is to study and validate the possibility to use mass-market technology for this purpose, testing four different devices (smartphones and video cameras) for the documentation of the cultural heritage.