Giving Historical Photographs a New Perspective: Introducing Camera Orientation Parameters as New Metadata in a Large-Scale 4D Application

Abstract

The ongoing digitization of historical photographs in archives allows investigating the quality, quantity, and distribution of these images. However, the exact interior and exterior camera orientations of these photographs are usually lost during the digitization process. The proposed method uses content-based image retrieval (CBIR) to filter exterior images of single buildings in combination with metadata information. The retrieved photographs are automatically processed in an adapted structure-from-motion (SfM) pipeline to determine the camera parameters. In an interactive georeferencing process, the calculated camera positions are transferred into a global coordinate system. As all image and camera data are efficiently stored in the proposed 4D database, they can be conveniently accessed afterward to georeference newly digitized images by using photogrammetric triangulation and spatial resection. The results show that the CBIR and the subsequent SfM are robust methods for various kinds of buildings and different quantity of data. The absolute accuracy of the camera positions after georeferencing lies in the range of a few meters likely introduced by the inaccurate LOD2 models used for transformation. The proposed photogrammetric method, the database structure, and the 4D visualization interface enable adding historical urban photographs and 3D models from other locations.

Solving photogrammetric cold cases using AI-based image matching: New potential for monitoring the past with historical aerial images

“…Two different methods were considered to process historical aerial images and especially to robustly find tie points between sequential image pairs. Both approaches have already shown good results on historical terrestrial images (Maiwald, 2022;Morelli et al, 2022;Maiwald et al, 2023). The first method combines the tie point extractor SuperPoint (DeTone et al, 2018) with the feature matching method Su-perGlue (Sarlin et al, 2020) and will in the following be referred to as SuperGlue.…”

A Digital 4D Information System on the World Scale: Research Challenges, Approaches, and Preliminary Results

“…The strategy for orientation of historical images is explained in detail in [130,290]. Here, the process is summarized, and recent improvements are highlighted.…”