THE METRIC DOCUMENTATION OF CHAM TOWERS IN VIETNAM BY SPHERICAL PHOTOGRAMMETRY

Abstract. The Università Politecnica delle Marche is charged of the study, survey and documentation of the Chan towers in Vietnam. The towers are spread near the coastline from latitude 16° 30', to latitude of 10° 56'. The Champa civilization flourished from 8th century till 17th century produced the Cham towers, places of religious worship. The ancient Cham people created a developed culture expressed in the architecture in the towers, which were Buddhist temples. Roughly there are six different architectonic styles and two different layouts in plan. One lay-out is that one main tower is surrounded by smaller service buildings, like walls, doors, gates; the other layout is a set of three aligned towers. We carried out the documentation with three different techniques, laser scanning, dense point clouds generation with SfM (Structure from Motion) algorithm, and mainly by Panoramic Spherical Photogrammetry (PSP). Laser scanning is indeed the best instrument but sometimes its availability is very limited for different practical and logistic reasons. The point cloud generation produced good results, but it has some problems and limitations of management too. On the other hand PSP is very quick technique in the taking phase, but the restitution is rather slow. PSP is suitable for a good metric documentation, making the Cham tower project the main project of documentation executed with spherical photogrammetry.