Piazza del Duomo, Italy

In February 2005 and July 2006, teams from the Development of Integrated Automatic Procedures for the Restoration of Monuments (DIAPReM) from the University of Ferrara, the Institute of Science and Information Technology of the National Research Council in Pisa and the Department of Architectural Design at the University of Florence conducted a High Definition Survey of the Piazza del Duomo. The data was acquired from 30 positions and was focused on the exterior parts of the Cathedral, the Campanile and the Baptistery. The 3D survey was coordinated and georeferenced with a topographical survey conducted by the DIAPReM team. The final 3D laser scan survey data was registered within the topographic survey with an average error of 3mm and fused into a master dataset (point cloud) that contains a total of 256,653,388 points.

Pisa's Piazza del Duomo, also known as Piazza dei Miracoli (Square of Miracles) is located north of the Arno river and measures nearly nine square hectares. Unlike the paved piazza's typical of Italy, the Piazza del Duomo is an expansive green grassy field dominated by four monumental works of architecture in luminous dressed stone and white marble. The site is made up of the renowned cathedral, baptistery, campanile, and monumental cemetery which provides an edge on the north side of the site.Built over the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries, their existence as four individual entities is typical of Italian architectural practice of this era.