Photogrammetric Reconstruction of a Stolen Statue

In this paper, we propose a method to reconstruct a digital 3D model of a stolen/damaged statue using photogrammetric methods. This task is challenging because the number of available photos for a stolen statue is in general very limited – especially the side/back view photos. Besides using standard structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo methods, we match image pairs with low overlap using sliding windows and maximize the normalized cross-correlation (NCC) based patch-consistency so that the image pairs can be well aligned into a complete model to build the 3D mesh surface. Our method is based on the prior of the planar side on the statue’s pedestal, which can cover a large range of statues. We hope this work will motivate more research efforts for the reconstruction of those stolen/damaged statues and heritage preservation.