Documentation of Istanbul Historic Peninsula by Kinematic Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Abstract

Although the Historic Peninsula of old Istanbul was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, complete documentation of this important area has not yet been carried out. In 2006 the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Historical Environment Protection Directorate initiated the "Historic Peninsula Project", which covers an area of 1500 ha and includes approximately 48 000 buildings in crowded and frequently narrow streets. BIMTAS, a company owned by the Municipality, immediately started the documentation of all buildings in the project area using terrestrial laser scanning. This created the challenge of building up an efficient production environment with new high-end technology to fulfil the requirements of this project in a very short timeframe of 2 years. This paper describes the entire production environment for documentation of all buildings, detailing the frequent adaptations of the process resulting from learning on the job. Although the data acquisition and mapping environment was established in the course of production, it was always essential to optimise the technical solutions in order to meet the requirements for data quality and delivery deadlines. Only 80 ha of the required 1500 ha was completed using static scanning during the first 6 months, thus requiring a change from static to mobile terrestrial laser scanning in order to accelerate the work and to conclude the scanning phase for the remaining major area within 3 months.