3D visualization for cultural heritage Documentation: a case study of the old pc's office Building in Nairobi. By

Abstract

The old Provincial Commissioner's (PC's) office building in Nairobi forms the case study in this thesis. The currently available form of visualization for this monument at the National Museums of Kenya (NMK) is in the form of a (2-D) survey plan. The basic objective of this study is to develop a methodology for creating a 3-D model of the above monument, which can also be extended and applied to similar monuments. The specific tasks undertaken to meet this objective can be summarized as follows: provision of photo control; close range image acquisition; photogrammetric processing of the images; 3D modelling from resulting photogrammetric solution; laser scanning; 3D modelling of the laser scan data; data fusion of the line model from photogrammetry with the line model from laser scan; and finally draping of the laser scan surface model with artificial computer generated texture. The results of the 3D line model from photogrammetry were not satisfactory. However, the stitching of the laser scan data using Cyclone" 3.0 software was done successfully, as well as the 3D surface model and the 3D line model using both AutoCAD 2002 and Golden Surfer 7.0. The fused 3D line model did not align perfectly. Nonetheless, the fused model shows that there is more to be gained in using both mapping technologies in the documentation of cultural heritage monuments.