The digital representation of the baroque in historic places

The digital representation of the baroque In historic places The development of digital survey with Structure From Motion (SFM) technology, a few years away from its introduction and diffusion, allows to make some thoughts about the feasibility of these systems. This sector, rapidly evolving in previous years, has reached a point of stability for the quality of the currents products. In the literature there are a lot of papers about the archaeological survey and small architectural details. Today it’s possible to make the survey of facades or parts of buildings both for archaeological and architectural purpose. Subject of this work is a comparison of a survey made by the laser scanner and the point clouds of the same object obtained by the SFM software. The occasion was provided by the facades of some baroque religious buildings in Catania, previously surveyed by 3D laser scanner, and today again photographed for the elaboration by the Zephyr 3Dflow software. The bibliography is recent and it is based on papers about SFM experiments, in the acts of the previous three International Meeting of Teachers of Representation Disciplines and the Congress of the Italian Union for Drawing. The methodology used in this work takes into account the comparison of results obtained by high dense image matching procedures and digital survey already performed by 3D laser scanner. In particular, we want to verify the accuracy and the reliability of metrical measurements, of the point cloud, of the mesh and of the texture. The aim is to determine how far a SFM survey can be considered a reliable alternative to a laser scanners survey.