Documenting Portland's Infrastructure with Reality Capture Technology

A bit of background...

Somewhere around 2010 or 2011, and after many, many hours/days/weeks/months and nights sleeping in my office chair, learning how to utilize 3D laser scanning technology to document buildings in Portland, Oregon, I met a wonderful person and PhD candidate from Greece through LinkedIn. Artemis Valanis was in the field of historic preservation and what she could do with 3D scanning and photogrammetry was mind-blowing at that time. In those days (not all that long ago really), to accomplish what we can do today with contemporary photogrammetry software could only happen with a deep understanding of programming and long nights of research. Artemis was such an individual and had the skill to project point clouds onto a 2D plane with her algorithms, match high-resolution imagery to this data, and provide photo-realistic, measurable data in a way that just wasn't possible with commercial, off-the-shelf software.

What I love most about LinkedIn as a social media platform is the sheer number of opportunities I've been afforded over the years. I've met thousands of professionals through this service and many of those meetings have turned into opportunities and actual paid projects. In fact, these have been some of my highest paying projects for ToPa 3D. And so, this author is certainly grateful for this platform. Meeting Artemis and others like her has certainly opened my eyes to what is possible with the type of technology we use at ToPa 3D. What is just now becoming widely available to the public is the result of hard work and the development of gifted programmers.

The software you and I can purchase today is powerful. It still requires a great deal of time and training to produce usable results, but the potential is right in front of us.

In 2011, I purchased a Parrot toy drone with a little webcam in an attempt to do photogrammetry on my previous employers office building. We were contracted to document the Gus Solomon Courthouse in downtown Portland and I was hoping to use something like this to create a mosaic of the facades. Using software called Kolor, I was able to stitch together about 1/4 of one facade in my tests. And, the resulting mosaic of our building looked like it was a test subject for what happens to buildings in a nuclear meltdown. Since then, Kolor has improved, and so have drones. We ended up using 3D laser scanning and photos from the streets, semi-stitched together with a complex PDF key map indicating what areas of the building were in mosaic format, and which were not. At least we tried -

Over the past couple of years, I've found great success with photogrammetric software. There are certainly things to look out for to include:

• 80% (or more) overlap between images
• Consistent lighting, which can be accomplished by flying in early mornings
• Knowing your software and how it typically processes various environmental scenarios (trial and error)

Documenting Oregon's History in 3D (almost)

A few years ago, I also thought it would be interesting to document 100 buildings of historic nature in Oregon - calling it the Sentinel Project. I spent a lot of time organizing this concept and enrolled a few folks to help out to include Restore Oregon (then known as the Historic Preservation League of Oregon), Dr. Lauren Allsopp (archivist for the Titanic and our grant writer extraordinaire) and CyArk. We applied for a $300k grant through the National Endowment of the Humanities to create an AR app to have a virtual window for seeing what the architecture would have looked like in its prime with CG and, in 2012, found out that we lost. I also suspect that the National Endowment committee selection members had little idea of what we were trying to do. We really didn't even know how to articulate it that well I suppose.

All that being said, it was a great experience to meet such interesting and intelligent people who all agreed to one degree or another that documenting historic infrastructure with 3D technology was generally a very good idea.

Seismic Sadness

It's been brought to the attention of Portlandians that our beautiful City of Roses is sitting on a seismic zone with a high likelihood of liquefaction should a seismic event occur. So if the tumbling unreinforced masonry buildings, falling bridges, and the sinking in quicksand don't do the job, perhaps the aftermath of no potable water or disease will.

Yep...we all gonna die. I'll miss you all.

But TOPA!! You may exclaim. THAT'S DEPRESSING!! In which we would reply, yes, yes it is. So, what can we do?

Run...

But in the meantime, perhaps we can prepare a bit. At some point, whether we have a natural event or perhaps discover that some developer with a lot of resources is deciding to purchase a historic block, develop a new hotel, and demolish some of our last remains of Portland's history, we can at least document what we have for those who come after us to experience and learn from.

An Example

ToPa 3D along with some of our partners have been archiving Oregon and Washington historic sites documented with 3D scanning or photogrammetry since we've been in business. We have a modest archive, yet it is continuing to grow. Some of these notable sites include:

• Peterson Rock Garden, Redmond, Oregon
• The Historic Rivoli Theater, Pendleton, Oregon
• The Oregon Caves, Cave Junction, Oregon
• St. Johns Bridge, Portland, Oregon
• The View Point Inn, Corbett, Oregon (post-fire, unfortunately)
• Timberline Lodge, Mt. Hood, Oregon
• The Old Capitol Building, Olympia, Washington
• and several others...

Now, lets take a look at our most recent documentation project. This one is just for us and simply for posterity. It was mapped using a Phantom 4 Pro sUAS in about 1.5 hours. Processing time took about 5 days to reconstruct using Bentley's ContextCapture software - arguably the most powerful 3D modeling software on the commercial market to date.

We did it for fun, for preservation, and for an example of what is now possible. We hope that anyone reading this that shares some of our views may consider speaking to the right people to begin implementing some sort of standard for city documentation for planning, safety, and for our future.

Nothing lasts forever...

Historical Preservation using Reality Capture Technology - Click on image to experience this structure in 3D!

Keeping Portland Weird,

ToPa 3D~