Colour digital survey of historic buildings site

Historical research, data survey and architectonical heritage graphic documentation are a fundamental staging area in the cognition phase to best understand and to outline the effective value of a cultural property and to define an appropriate plan of preservation and management of a particular heritage. During the course of last two years, some projects concerning the exploration of innovative methods and the use of digital media have been carried out, applied to the management, preservation and promotion of the architectural/historical heritage building, in small and medium-size cities. The color survey of plastered painted façades and monumental-historical buildings represents a difficult operation due to a lot of factors such as subjective aspects of visual perception, objective characteristics relating to sources of lighting and the way one watches something. The significant increase in the use of techniques and digital media as tools for documentation, management and communication of cultural and architectural heritage has dramatically transformed the way in which informations are collected, processed and disseminated. The Information/knowledge System that can be produced comprises the following documents: ortho-photos and digital drawings of the façades of those buildings located along the streets of the city centre; data-base collecting a specific report per each façade of every building; project report for each building; a 3-D digital reconstruction model for each urban block of the ‘historical centre’. The survey, graphic analysis, and the study of the city plan structure – as well as construction techniques and knowledge of the correct building materials, enriches our knowledge and expertise of a given heritage, and provides us with understanding of the best use, preservation and promotion of urban property The paper reports processes and methodologies developed in those researches about digital/instrumental survey of architectural/historical heritage building, developed for qualifying the problem of the acquisition and rendering the reflectance properties of surface/ facade building, maintaining/ensuring the fidelity of information throughout the whole color image processing. The paper reports in order to achieve photo-realistic 3D models using digital images projected onto the geometry of 3D digital models.