3D and 2D documentation and visualization of cultural heritage

The use of 3D models for a deeper study of historical buildings has significantly increased over the last years and indeed 3D visualizations and animations in architectural heritage preservation has been a big issue for the whole scientific community. The cooperation between different disciplines such as photogrammetry and computer science (computer graphics) provides the opportunity to develop new tools and techniques for filing buildings documentation. The present technologies and methodologies for classifying architectural allow the generation of very realistic 3D models (especially in terms of geometry and texture). This paper describes the generation of 2D and 3D models of Castel del Monte in Southern Italy. In particular, for the 2D model, directed to the realization of an automatic procedure in order to obtain 2D data from the real building. This because most of the applications for laser scanned data treatment that are commonly available on the market are not conceived to provide automatically such a representation (the great majority of them, in fact, can do it only after a very careful manual reconstruction of the original design of the building). At the end of the whole process, the result is an accurately texturized 3D model.