AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH FOR THE DOCUMENTATION WITH TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING OF THE 1035 AD CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER

Abstract

The archaeological site of Ani is located in the city of Kars in northeast Turkey. The archeology area provides a thorough account of the development of medieval architecture and showcases virtually all of the numerous architectural advances that the area experienced between the seventh and thirteenth century AD. The Redeemer Church is one of the architectural monuments of the medieval city of Ani, "known as the city of the thousand and one churches or the city with 40 Doors." The Redeemer Church is one of the few structures still standing in Ani from the prosperous Armenian Bagratid era of AD's tenth and eleventh. In this study, the Church, scanned with 3D terrestrial laser scanning technology by World Monument Fund (WMF) partner Solvotek, was modeled and analyzed using an Open Source program (Cloud Compare) and MatLab Program for 3D documentation. The 3D mesh models, the non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces, and the inscriptions of the Church were firstly generated after analyzing the object details measured by Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) in this study. Also, a new approach is proposed to automatically extract the surfaces and the inscriptions (such as handwriting and complicated shaped surfaces) of historical artifacts using parametric features. When the results are evaluated, the RANSAC algorithm applied for NURBS surfaces has extracted the surfacial information successfully. Furthermore, the lines were obtained by using geometric features and the inscriptions on the wall both were obtained automatically with available applications, but with new approaches; the newly proposed approaches have shown that they can be applied successfully in cultural heritage studies.