CHALLENGING ARCHITECTURES: AN INTEGRATED AND MULTIPURPOSE SURVEY FOR THE COMPLETE MAPPING OF THE EMIR PALACE IN KOGON (UZBEKISTAN)

Abstract. The documentation of Cultural Heritage, and in particular architecture, is nowadays conducted with a combination of several geomatic techniques. Most of them relies on the exploitation of 3D point cloud, which is the state of art data to produce almost every output. The starting point of each recovery intervention is the survey, which enable a multidisciplinary approach for the knowledge of a building and, consequently, to preserve it for future generation. When it comes with complex architectures, however, the surveying approach is more compelling and challenging at the same time. The definition of the final accuracy requires a tidy design process that should be done a priori, and a set of strict rules need to be respected. With the advent of new automatic procedures, the number of data collected increases, but this doesn’t mean that well established method, like topography, can be neglected. This work is the demonstration of how old and new method must coexist. The present work describes the work carried out to the complete 3D reconstruction of a complex building, namely the Emir’s Palace place in Kogon, Uzbekistan. Given its dimension and decorative apparatus, maintaining a high standard of definition without losing metrological accuracy was the main challenge. The work was carried out with a combination of both Terrestrial Laser Scanner and Aerial Photogrammetry for the 3D reconstruction, and on a very accurate topographic network for the combination of produced point clouds. The result of this first phase of the work was a polygonal network with a millimetric accuracy. Besides, another important contribution of the paper lies on the exploitation of the panoramic images coming from the TLS within a photogrammetric software. Indeed, by exploiting the depth map, it was possible to produce very detailed orthophotos for the production of 1:10 scale drawings. The work, performed in a joint venture between Academia and SMEs, is an excellent example (useful to be shared within the research community dealing with 3D representation and optimization) of innovative methodologies developed to produce reliable drawings and 3D representation for different purposes, being the starting point for each kind of project.