Three-Dimensional Digitization of Archaeological Sites—The Use Case of the Palace of Knossos

Abstract

Modern digitization technologies have created an increasing number of possibilities for capturing the physical dimensions and appearance of archaeological artifacts and sites in 3D. The usage of such data is usually targeted to the research, study, and documentation of our cultural heritage. At the same time, the increasing quality of the produced digitizations has opened new possibilities for the further exploitation of digitization outcomes in a wider context than initially expected. A pioneer in this direction was the gaming industry, where photogrammetry has been recently employed to achieve extreme photorealism. Of course, challenges still exist, especially when digitization accuracy is of importance, such as in the case of large-scale archaeological sites. Further challenges regard the need to combine indoor and outdoor scenes that pose requirements in the selection of the appropriate digitization modalities and post-processing strategies. In more detail, the challenges relate to the appropriate usage of existing technologies, organization issues in terms of digitization visits, the combination and registration of data, data acquisition, and data processing methodologies, etc. In this paper, we demonstrated a methodology for the digitization of archaeological sites that can be used for creating digital assets suitable for various scenarios including research, education, and entertainment.