Facad of La Merced Church, World Heritage

The Historic District of Panama City was registered as a World Heritage site in 1997.  Panama City was first settled by Spaniards.  Then it was destroyed by pirates to ruin. In the Historic District, a mixture of Spanish, French, and Early American style architecture is preserved. One of our objectives for measuring the church facade was to demonstrate a way to preserve and restore a cultural heritage using a laser range finder.  It may replace the traditional way of recording such objects by manual measurement.

Scanning

A view of the church facade seen from the 3rd floor balcony of the Mayor’s House	A view of the street seen from the 3rd floor balcony of the Mayor’s House	Staff members with their equipment in front of the church
A laser range finder set up at the 2nd floor balcony of the Mayor’s House		The front of the church
Balconies of the Mayor’s House	Mayor’s House	Staff members with their equipment in front of the church

In February 2002, we acquired 3D data of the church facade with the cooperation of National Research Institute for Cultural Properties (NASRIPT), Tokyo, and Instituto Nacional De Cultura (INAC).  The purpose of the scanning was to record, using 3D range measurement technologies, the present shape of the church, which waits for a future restoration. 

We used a Cyrax 2400 range scanner to scan large surfaces.  We obtained a permission to measure the facade from the Mayor’s House, which stands across from the church.  We had some problems in choosing the scanning points where we needed to set up the equipment, because the street between the church and the Mayor’s House was narrow and the church facade we wanted to scan was tall. 

An agreement was reached between INAC and NARIPT Mr. Kagesawa of the Computer Vision Lab spoke at the ceremony

After the scanning, The ceremony was held in order to make the agreement of the cooperative heritage preservation between INAC and NARIPT, and then we presented our modeling in 3D digital form to Panamanian architects and students engaging in the preservation and restoration of historical heritage.

Result

Acquired range images were aligned to the same co-ordinates.  They were merged to form a complete model.  The model was then manually refined.  Here are a few samples of the final models. Click each image to display a larger image.