Detection of Changes of Ancient Buildings from Terrestrial Laser Scanning and Hyperspectral Imaging

Ancient buildings have various geometric and material changes caused by the historical and natural factors, and their comprehensive detection has also been a more important challenge. This way, in this paper, a flexible, scientific approach from terrestrial laser scanning and hyperspectral imaging is provided for this issue. It is possible to flexibly and accurately detect some potential crisis, which cannot be found in some surface phenomena of historical buildings. Furthermore, one of the main characteristic of this method is that the time and place of the two data acquisition need not be limited, but they can be accurately fused. Another one of the main features is that the fusion data can synthetically detect geometric and material changes of historical buildings. This method was applied to the case study of the Beijing Tianningsi Tower, an extremely dazzling pearl of the Chinese Buddhist pagoda, on which the signs of deformation and restoration were found in the tower shape and in the tower-body sculpture. It was possible to assess the typical physical, chemical, and biological changes of historical buildings, to provide scientific basis for comprehensive research. The results demonstrate that this method is feasible and applicable for detecting changes of ancient buildings and is applied to similar research using more analytical methods for multisource data.