Using vertical panoramic images to record a historic cemetery

Abstract

In 1919, during colonization of the West Region of São Paulo State, Brazil, the Ogassawara family built a cemetery and a school with donations received from the newspaper Osaka Mainichi Shimbum, in Osaka, Japan. The cemetery was closed by President Getúlio Vargas in 1942, during the Second World War. The architecture of the Japanese cemetery is a unique feature in Latin America. Even considering its historical and cultural relevance, there is a lack of geometric documentation about the location and features of the tombs and other buildings within the cemetery. As an alternative to provide detailed and fast georeferenced information about the area, it is proposed to use near vertical panoramic images taken with a digital camera with fisheye lens as the primary data followed by bundle adjustment and photogrammetric restitution. The aim of this paper is to present a feasibility study on the proposed technique with the assessment of the results with a strip of five panoramic images, taken over some graves in the Japanese cemetery. The results showed that a plant in a scale of 1:200 can be produced with photogrammetric restitution at a very low cost, when compared to topographic surveying or laser scanning. The paper will address the main advantages of this technique as well as its drawbacks, with quantitative analysis of the results achieved in this experiment.