Terrestrial Laser Scanning for the digital protection of historical architecture

Recently, Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is widely applied in protecting and archiving historical architecture because it can obtain accurate and dense 3D points. Simultaneously, advanced database management platform supports spatial and attribute data, it is essential to historical architecture representation and data dissemination. So, it is possible to describe historical architecture thanks to the combination of database and TLS technology. In this work, we described detailedly field data acquisition and data process, provided the method that the registration of multi-station point clouds by the corresponding targets which is with common reference coordinate and TLS local coordinate. In addition, the database is adopted to achieve data management and conservation because mass spatial data and attribute data including point clouds data, control points data, image data, texture data, and other text files were obtained in the experiment. The result shows that TLS and above-mentioned methods in the digital protection of historic architecture are feasible.