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The paper presents the case study of the complete 3D survey of the area of the Fort of Pietole in Borgo Virgilio using the Leica Pegasus Backpack wearable Mobile Mapping System (MMS). Surveying the site is challenging because of its complex topology on the one hand (with notably narrow passages) and because of the presence of vegetation on the other. The framework within which this research takes place is the Fort of Pietole survey project that aims at the extraction of the Digital Terrain Model (DTM) of the area and the georeferencing of the fort defensive structures. The requirement of the project is the 3D reconstruction of the whole area at an accuracy that stands between a big scale environmental survey and a small-scale architectonic survey (1 : 500). The project is the opportunity to discuss the state of the art of wearable MMS, and to test the versatility and accuracy outcomes of the Pegasus Backpack under varying and challenging condition (indoor-outdoor, even-uneven pavement, satellite covered-denied areas) with the ambitious goal to use only the backpack MMS to record all the data from the DTM to the indoor narrow structures.

Narrow spaces and passages are not a rare encounter in cultural heritage, the shape and extension of those areas place a serious challenge on any techniques one may choose to survey their 3D geometry. Especially on techniques that make use of stationary instrumentation like terrestrial laser scanning. The ratio between space extension and cross section width of many corridors and staircases can easily lead to distortions/drift of the 3D reconstruction because of the problem of propagation of uncertainty. This paper investigates the use of fisheye photogrammetry to produce the 3D reconstruction of such spaces and presents some tests to contain the degree of freedom of the photogrammetric network, thereby containing the drift of long data set as well. The idea is that of employing a multi-camera system composed of several fisheye cameras and to implement distances and relative orientation constraints, as well as the pre-calibration of the internal parameters for each camera, within the bundle adjustment. For the beginning of this investigation, we used the NCTech iSTAR panoramic camera as a rigid multi-camera system. The case study of the Amedeo Spire of the Milan Cathedral, that encloses a spiral staircase, is the stage for all the tests. Comparisons have been made between the results obtained with the multi-camera configuration, the auto-stitched equirectangular images and a data set obtained with a monocular fisheye configuration using a full frame DSLR. Results show improved accuracy, down to millimetres, using a rigidly constrained multi-camera.

The research illustrated in this article aimed at identifying a good standard methodology to survey very narrow spaces during 3D investigation of Cultural Heritage. It is an important topic in today’s era of BIM modelling applied to Cultural Heritage. Spaces like staircases, corridors and passages are very common in the architectural or archaeological fields, and obtaining a 3D-oriented survey of those areas can be a very complex task when completeness of the model and high precision are requested. Photogrammetry appears to be the most promising solution in terms of versatility and manoeuvrability also considering the quality of the required data. Fisheye lenses were studied and tested in depth because of their significant advantage in the field of view if compared with rectilinear lenses. This advantage alone can be crucial to reduce the total amount of photos and, as a consequence, to obtain manageable data, to simplify the survey phase and to significantly reduce the elaboration time. In order to overcome the main issue that arise when using fisheye lenses, which is the lack of rules that can be employed to design the survey, a general mathematical formulation to precisely estimate the GSD (Ground Sampling Distance) for every optical projection is presented here. A complete survey of a real complex case study was performed in order to test and stress the proposed methodology, and to handle a fisheye-based survey from beginning to end: the photogrammetric survey of the Minguzzi Staircase. It is a complex service spiral-staircase located in the Duomo di Milano with a total height of 25 meters and characterized by a narrow walkable space about 70 centimetres wide.