CI PA 2003 XIX th International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
castles where people visiting the site should not 
be disturbed. Due to the large field of view of 
the scanner, 360° horizontally (azimuth) and 
270° vertically (elevation), the scene to be 
modelled has to be surveyed only from a few 
points of view. Together with the high 
performance measuring device (up to 625,000 
points per second), this enables the user to 
survey the scene in a very short time. A typical 
scan with 4,200 rows and 10,000 points per row 
is completed in less than 180s. As it is often not 
necessary to take a scan of the whole environ 
ment, it is also possible to define a special 
window which is intended to be surveyed. 
Important objects can be measured down to the 
smallest details with this feature, as you can 
easily set a very high resolution for this win 
dow. The maximum resolution of the sensor is 
up to 20,000 rows with up to 36,000 points 
which results in an excellent area coverage and 
resolution of small structures. 
Figure 1: IMAGER 5003 
The laser scanner can operate in total darkness 
as well as in daylight. This facilitates measure 
ment, since no additional illumination is need 
ed. This fact can be of particular importance for 
cultural sites where certain areas, castles or 
churches, are difficult to illuminate. 
The great advantage of the laser scanner is that 
the data is stored directly on a computer during 
the measurements and therefore is digitally 
available. The laser scanner is controlled with a 
standard PC or laptop. The control program (see 
chapter 2) is user-friendly and easy to under 
stand, so that even untrained people can take 
scans without problems. The point cloud, which 
is the result of a measurement, has to be trans 
formed into a CAD model for documentation 
purposes. This transformation is a semi 
automatic process, done by special algorithms 
of programs which are developed especially for 
processing the point clouds. 
1.2 DLR Panoramic colour camera 
This camera is developed in a common project 
between an industrial company and the 
Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt 
(DLR) for environmental documentation purpo 
ses. The camera consists of a rotating unit 
which rotates an integrated line chip 360° to 
achieve a full view of the environment. By 
using three line chips with each 10,000 ele 
ments a high resolution can be achieved with 
the imaging. Three lines (RGB) provide each 16 
Bit information of the environment and guaran 
tee a high dynamic range with monitoring. 
The resulting images consists of a maximum of 
yl, 
Figure 2: Panoramic camera 
10,200 by 500,000 pixels each containing three 
Mbit RGB values. The image is stored by a 
specially developed frame grabber onto the hard 
disk of a computer. A typical scan (10,000 x 
30,000) usig a special optical lens system by 
35mm optical focus length by the DLR camera 
takes about 3min (normal light) up to 20min 
(artificial illumination), mainly depending on 
the ambient illumination conditions and the 
number of rows to be measured with the 
camera.