Virtual Scene Construction of Large-Scale Cultural Heritage : A Framework Initiated from the Case Study of the Grand Canal of China

摘要

Virtual reality technology has been applied to the protection of cultural heritage for about 20years. However, methods or systems of cultural heritage reported in previous studies are stillunable to represent large-scale cultural heritage sites such as the Beijing-Hangzhou GrandCanal, the Struve Geodetic Arc and the boundaries of the Roman Empire. We aimed atconstructing a large-scale cultural-heritage 3-D model with the focus on better managementand organization of the scene. Starting from the case study of the Beijing-Hangzhou GrandCanal, we first explore various remote sensing data suitable for large-scale cultural heritagemodeling, and then adopt a 3-D geographic global information system for large-scale 3-Dscene organization and management.The entire 3-D virtual scene reconstruction process can be divided into four steps. The first oneis the remote-sensing data preparation, where TM, SPOT5 and other remote sensing data wereselected according to the characteristics of the cultural heritage of the Grand Canal and furthersubjected to data filtering and geometric correction. In the second step, the 3-D terrainmodeling was carried out based on 3-D earth model segmentation and tile hierarchy system,where we fused and split remote sensing image and sampling spatial information for 3-Dterrain model. The third step involves the modeling of local heritage with sophisticatedmodeling techniques sufficient to build a heritage 3-D model and to integrate terrain model withlocal scene through aerial orthophotos. Finally, in the fourth step the virtual scene integrationis performed in a 3-D spherical system, where we designed a tree nodes system to assembly andmanage multi-level and multi-type models of the Grand Canal. After these four steps arecompleted, the large-scale cultural heritage scene in 3-D spherical information system can beachieved.Here, we address main challenges in virtual scene reconstruction of large-scale culturalheritage. This study can be valuable for regional and national cultural heritage protection aswell as for Chinese government as a reference to infrastructural research, and finally forstimulation of other large-scale cultural heritage research around the world both in 3-Dmodeling and virtual scene organization.