Automatic Systems for Digitizing Historical Maps

This work is part of a research branch that studies how to acquire metric, semantic and symbolic information from historical maps without damaging the physical support. The technological growth regarding both mechanical instruments and digital high-resolution sensors allowed the development of suitable tools for the digitization of historical maps and creation of more accurate digital models; therefore, by now, the use of automatic systems for acquisition of digital data is continuously spreading. In the work described in this paper we used a robotic arm (UR10), on which we mounted a digital camera in order to acquire high-resolution images of any object following a regular grid. The arm movement was programmed to keep the rotation angles of the camera constant while shifting it at pre-defined quantities along the two axes. The tests performed demonstrated that we could obtain a three-dimensional model with an accuracy below the millimetre in an almost automatic way.