Architectural Heritage: 3D Documentation and Structural Monitoring Using UAV

Architectural heritage preservation and dissemination is a very important topic in Cultural Heritage. Since ancient structures may present areas which are dangerous or difficult to access, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles may be a smart solution for the safe and fast data acquisition. In this paper, we propose a method for the long term monitoring of cracking patterns, based on image processing and marker-based technique. Also the paper includes the description of a pipeline for the reconstruction of interactive 3D scene of the historic structure to disseminate the acquired data, to provide the general public with info regarding the structural health of the structure, and possibly to support the drone pilot during the survey. The Introduction provides a state of the art about the crack monitoring from visible images; it follows a description of the proposed method, and the results of the experimentation carried out in a real case study (the Ancient Fortress in Livorno, Italy). A specific section is devoted to the description of the front-end of augmented reality designed for heritage dissemination and to support the drone usage. Details about the future works conclude the paper.