Accurate 3D reconstruction and realistic visualization of both archaeological sites and ancient monuments allow experts to finetune their theories on the lost links in the history of civilization. Although the 3D reconstruction is a major challenge, precisely because of the lack of visual information, it constitutes a crucial task for experts to study and interact with long disappeared settlements and structures. Furthermore, the public in general will become provided with the conditions to explore them in virtual environments, thus fostering cultural, social and scientific participation.
Highly accurate reconstruction is, nevertheless, a very complex task, where all stages of image synthesis must be carefully executed from highly detailed 3D models in order to obtain a faithful depiction of the object of interest. Meanwhile, the textual descriptions and geospatial data collected by archaeologists on site may be used to overcome the absence of visual information.
Still, this data will not suffice, in which case procedural modelling turns out to be essential in order to avoid a great deal of time and labour consuming modelling processes. Consequently, to reduce the amount of human intervention, this project aims, besides other objectives, to develop an expeditious 3D modelling system. Accordingly, our modelling system is guided by heritage knowledge about the construction rules of heritage structures, encoded in a formal grammar by expert knowledge in historical architecture procedures. This system also encompass the modelling of façades and interiors in a way that both modelling processes integrate seamlessly and complement missing knowledge of the structure.
This is achieved using procedural modelling techniques for the generation of detailed buildings with exterior facades and interiors. The procedural modelling process is guided by a set of rules extracted automatically from textual descriptions or given by the user through a rule editing visual interface.