Automatic Reconstruction of Virtual Heritage Sites

Abstract

The virtual reconstruction of heritage sites has been the focus of many projects. These typically involve significant use of manual reconstruction techniques, and thus a great deal of human effort to create the virtual structures. Also, often, there is not sufficient physical evidence to recreate these structures precisely as they may have been in the past. To address these issues a domain specific modelling method for the automatic generation of virtual heritage structures is presented in this paper. The method is guided by heritage knowledge about the construction rules of heritage structures, encoded in a formal grammar, and may be used to create new structures automatically. The case study entails the automatic reconstruction of the archaeological site of Conimbriga, in Portugal, which contains the ruins of an ancient city of the Roman Empire. The results show the generation of a virtual reconstruction of a particular house, the House of the Skeletons, which had an important relevance to the city because of its architecture.