Digital photogrammetry: a standard approach to cultural heritage survey

Digital photogrammetry offers an easy and economical approach to the metric survey of cultural heritage. New software able to manage all photogrammetric procedures (orientation and plotting) are now offered at low cost. They run on standard PC and offer user-friendly interfaces allowing them to be used even by unskilled operators. Photogrammetric survey of cultural heritage can be managed by two different specialists: a photogrammetric expert who plans and executes the image acquisitions, the control point survey and the orientation of the images and an architectural surveyor who interprets the 3D model in order to extract all the necessary information considering the goals of the survey. The paper describes a standard metric survey organisation considering the two different skills with wich to build the 3D model and to extract the traditional representations required to understand the object and to plan a correct restoration procedure.