Multi-scale geometry acquisition and visualization: issues and techniques

Cultural heritage has always been a privileged field of the application of new techniques for geometry acquisition and visualization. The outstanding improvement of hardware resources, and the advancement in algorithms resulted in the possibility to manage and interactively visualize impressive amounts of data. Entire geographic areas can be handled, and information at different level of detail has to be managed. Useful data can be provided from very different sources (time-of-flight and triangulation scans, modeled meshes, satellite data, height maps, cadastral maps, drawings...) In the context of the integration of so heterogeneous geometric data several issues arise. It is possible to identify three main problems: the interpretation and codification of input data, the integration of geometry with different level of detail (i.e. acquired with radically different sampling resolution) and the interactive visualization of heterogeneous databases