UAV-based Scanning Vianden Castle
- Service des Sites et Monuments Nationaux (SSMN)
- 3D documentation of a castle complex
UAV-based scanning of Vianden Castle with the Riegl high-performance Ricopter UAV
In April 2015, ArcTron 3D GmbH, the renowned engineering company who specializes in Cultural Heritage and Archaeology, based in Regensburg, Germany, worked together with RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems, the world leader in LiDAR systems from Austria in a quite unique research project. Now the first results of the data analysis are being published.
ArcTron has been extremely active in 3D research and documentation of Vianden castle in Luxembourg for the last 10 years. This ongoing research has now grown with a new, highly innovative approach.
By means of their newly developed surveying UAV, the RIEGL RiCOPTER, RIEGL delivered an extremely high resolution 3D dataset.
RiCOPTER is a high-performance multirotor UAV with an integrated LiDAR Sensor, the RIEGL VUX-1, with an overall weight of below 25kg.
It can be employed fully autonomously for airborne laser scanning.
For the survey of Castle Vianden, the RiCOPTER flew three missions of approximately 15 minutes each, proving its flight stability even under very adverse wind conditions.
The RIEGL VUX-1, the integrated high-quality LiDAR sensor, acquired astonishingly detailed and highly accurate data point clouds, colorized by means of integrated calibrated cameras.
It was clearly demonstrated that this “flying surveying robot” is able to conduct very complex 3D inventories in an extremely short amount of time.
Currently, the acquired data – that was presented for the first time worldwide at the RIEGL LIDAR 2015 user conference in Hong Kong in early May – are being meticulously compared with existing 3D datasets of Vianden.
This data has been acquired since 2004 by means of terrestrial and airborne RIEGL laser scanners and in combination with photogrammetric technologies.
Thanks to these long-lasting high-detail 3D documentation efforts, Castle Vianden, situated in the Luxembourg part of the Ardennes, might well represent one of the
best 3D documented architectural monuments of this kind in the world.
The results of ArcTron’s pioneering work is on display in extensive presentations, 3D-animations and virtual reality visualizations at the CIPA 2015,
an international Cultural Heritage Symposium to be held in Taiwan this summer.
The project will also be presented at the RIEGL and Arctron’s boothes at Intergeo 2015 in Stuttgart.
The innovative research project is supported by the Luxemburg state office for the preservation of monuments (SSMN), and the association “Friends of Castle Vianden”.
Article in the general surveying news "avn" 6-7/2015
This project has made it on the front page of the “avn.”
Click on the graphic to view the article.
