Orthoimages of the outer walls and towers of the château de Chambord

Abstract

The château de Chambord is one of the most famous castles in the world as it is an emblem of French Renaissance architecture. It was built at the beginning of the 16th century and has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1981. The monitoring of such a monument involves the organization and visualization of data sets such as archive documents, survey data, scientific documentation, restoration reports, meteorological data, etc. This process requires the realization of a support for documentation which may be an orthoimage. A photogrammetric survey was recently performed, in the framework of the traditional fieldwork of the students in the PPMD master's degree (Specialized Master’s in Positionning, Photogrammetry and Deformation Measurement) at the French National School of Geographic Sciences (ENSG). High resolution images were taken from the ground level, using two off-the-shelf reflex cameras, equipped with a 35 mm, a 100 mm and a 200 mm focal length lens according to the needs. The MicMac software was used for the bundle adjustment, the georeferencing and the dense correlation procedures, including orthoimage calculation. Added to plane-based orthoimages, cylinder-based orthoimages were generated for the 2D representation of the outer walls of the château de Chambord including façades and towers. Fitting the 2D projection to the mean characteristics of the geometry has a promising documentation potential for GIS applications in heritage studies.