DATA FUSION OF HISTORICAL PHOTOGRAPHS WITH MODERN 3D DATA FOR AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATION – CONCEPT AND FIRST RESULTS

Abstract

Through the destruction of war, most of the documents of an archaeological excavation from 1934 – 1939 of a megalithic tomb in north-west Germany have been destroyed irretrievably. Fortunately, more than 500 historical pictures have been preserved, which visually document the excavation situation at that time. Parts of the image collection are preserved on fragile glass plates that are difficult to preserve and have to be digitised urgendly. A method for digitising these glass plates will be presented first. With the help of the digitised historical images, the excavation situation at that time shall be reconstructed. Since a reconstruction based only on the historical images is not possible, the current state of the megalithic tombs has been recorded with modern measuring technology and a 3D model has been calculated. The aim is to fuse the historical images with the modern 3D model. For this purpose, different possibilities of linking the data are presented. As first results, point clouds calculated by Structure from Motion and the orientation of historical images in relation to the modern 3D model using direct linear transformation are shown. The hybrid model of historical and modern data will be used for archaeological interpretations of the excavation.