Cultural Heritage Reconstruction From Historical Photographs and Videos

Abstract

Historical archives save invaluable treasures and play a critical role in the conservation of Cultural Heritage. Old photographs and videos, which have survived over time and stored in these archives, preserve traces of architecture and urban transformation and, in many cases, are the only evidence of buildings that no longer exist. They are a precious source of enormous informative potential in Cultural Heritage documentation and save invaluable treasures. Thanks to photogrammetric techniques it is possible to extract metric information from these sources useful for 3D virtual reconstructions of monuments and historic buildings. This paper explores the ways to search for, classify and group historical data by considering their possible use in metric documentation and aims to provide an overview of criticality and open issues of the methodologies that could be used to process these data. A practical example is described and presented as a case study. The video “Torino 1928”, an old movie dating from the 1930s, was processed for reconstructing the temporary pavilions of the “Exposition” held in Turin in 1928. Despite the initial concerns relating to processing this kind of data, the experimental methodology used in this research has allowed to reach a quality of results of acceptable standard.

Reconstruction of Lost Architectural Volumes by Integration of Photogrammetry From Archive Imagery With 3-D Models of the Status Quo

“…digital or analogue -older photographs are more challenging to process due to archival quality, digitization issues, technical equipment and film media (Mainwald et al, 2017). The major problems with historical images include the availability of material from different sources and of unknown origin with low image quality, a total lack of information about camera parameters and the presence of deformations of the original (Condorelli & Rinaudo, 2018). The use of historical images to generate 3-D models of lost historic-architectural heritage is widely documented in literature.…”

The Gamher Research Project for Metric Documentation of Cultural Heritage: Current Developments

“…Distance based software in some cases allow to analyze the discrepancies of targeted points used for the point cloud registration also if automatic Iterative Closest Point (ICP) based procedures are used . Surveyors know that only a precision assessment is not enough to certify the quality of a metric survey: systematic errors could affect in some ways the achieved results in all the measurement processes (Condorelli et al, 2018).…”

A WebGIS for Visualizing Historical Activities Based on Photos: The Project of Yunnan–Vietnam Railway Web Map

“…The defects of historical photos, such as low pixel, distortion, or damages caused by improper storage, are overcome by modern digital technology. In some projects, the digitized historical images of historic buildings are analyzed to show the details of building decorations [43]. Moreover, the photogrammetry method based on historical photos is applied in many cases, for example, the restoration of modern buildings in Berlin after the wars [44].…”