Recording and modeling of cultural heritage objects with coded structured light projection systems

Active sensors (Blais 2004), based on coherent (laser) and non-coherent light, are nowadays used for many kinds of 3D reconstruction tasks and recently very much for the recording and 3D documentation of cultural heritage objects. They have become a very common source of documentation data, in particular for non-expert users, as they easily provide range data of surfaces in high resolution and with high accuracy. Compared to passive image-based approaches (Remondino and ElHakim, 2006), active sensors provide directly and quickly 3D information of the surveyed object in form of range data (point clouds). Active sensors are suitable for different scales and objects. While the recording devices are still relatively expensive, important progress has been made in recent years towards an efficient processing and analysis of range data.