A VERSATILE WORKFLOW FOR 3D RECONSTRUCTIONS AND MODELLING OF CULTURAL HERITAGE SITES BASED ON OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

Nowadays commercial 3D range scanning systems have been used for the accurate digitisation of cultural heritage sites by following either terrestrial or aerial scanning approaches. Both approaches require high cost special equipment and software to cope with the vast amount of raw data. These raw data can be characterised as superfluous in cases where the main scope of the reconstruction is a web-based virtual walkthrough for tourism promotion. The low budget of a digitisation project dictates its breadth and scopes. In some cases, even leasing the equipment is prohibitive. Producing affordable 3D reconstructions for real time virtual walkthroughs is still a challenging task. The transformation of raw 3D range scanning data to an optimised textured triangulated mesh is still a nonautomated process. On the basis of this description, a set of open source software applications were identified and combined on a practical workflow to be used for such 3D reconstruction projects when funding and infrastructure is at its minimum. We have attempted to evaluate the proposed process by producing a 3D approximation of a small part of the old town in the city of Kavala located in North-Eastern Greece.