Photogrammetry

Digital photogrammetry uses multiple photographs of the same object or surface to derive surface details of the archaeological material.  The photogrammetric technique has been available to archaeologists for generations, but recent innovations in digital photography, computer hardware, and computer vision have improved the speed and quality of the results.  At a large scale, this method allowed our team to produce comprehensive images of walls and floors belonging to particularly complex multi-phase buildings by means of a small number of photographs: hand-drawn plans of these structures would have taken far longer.  In particular, we concentrated on high-resolution photogrammetry that not only generated visual representations, but also metrically-accurate survey records.  The results of this approach can be comparable to – or even better than – data gathered using a non-contact digitizer, such as a laser scanner.