UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND 3D MODELING APPLIED TO VIRTUAL RECONSTRUCTION OF AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE IN THE BRONCE AGE

Abstract. The risk of disappearing of cultural heritage of archaeological sites is directly related to the protection level by the corresponding administrations. This is the case of Cortijo Nuevo, an archaeological site with no known precedents in the Iberian Peninsula in the Bronze Age.

The recent development of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) used as platform carrying digital cameras, let to adapt the well-known classical Photogrammetry technique, in conjunction with Structure from Motion (SfM) and Multi View Stereo (MVS) algorithms, for very high accurate surveying of the terrain.

In this work, several digital cartographic products including point cloud, Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and orthoimage were obtained from UAV-Photogrammetric flight with the purpose of document and virtual reconstruction of a damaged archaeological site. All the technical prescriptions of the flight and photogrammetric project were designed for accurately representing the state of the terrain in both epochs, current and previous to damage. The quality control for quantify planimetric and altimetric errors, based on 33 ground control points, showed RMSE_xy = 0.0246 m, RMSE_z = 0.0262 m and the total error sum of 0.0359 m. An integration of virtual 3D archaeological structures with the obtained terrain models was carried out through augmented reality technology, based on the information obtained in this work.