4D reconstruction of the past: the image retrieval and 3D model construction pipeline

Abstract

One of the main characteristics of the Internet era we are living in, is the free and online availability of a huge amount of data. This data is of varied reliability and accuracy and exists in various forms and formats. Often, it is cross-referenced and linked to other data, forming a nexus of text, images, animation and audio enabled by hypertext and, recently, by the Web3.0 standard. Our main goal is to enable historians, architects, archaeologists, urban planners and affiliated professionals to reconstruct views of historical monuments from thousands of images floating around the web. This paper aims to provide an update of our progress in designing and implementing a pipeline for searching, filtering and retrieving photographs from Open Access Image Repositories and social media sites and using these images to build accurate 3D models of archaeological monuments as well as enriching multimedia of cultural / archaeological interest with metadata and harvesting the end products to EU-ROPEANA. We provide details of how our implemented software searches and retrieves images of archaeological sites from Flickr and Picasa repositories as well as strategies on how to filter the results, on two levels; a) based on their built-in metadata including geo-location information and b) based on image processing and clustering techniques. We also describe our implementation of a Structure from Motion pipeline designed for producing 3D models using the large collection of 2D input images (>1000) retrieved from Internet Repositories.

Augmented Citizen Science for Environmental Monitoring and Education

“…Additionally, the on-board smartphone sensors are used to validate the correct orientation and location to exclude false positives. Hadjiprocopis et al (2014) show possible use cases for historical photography time series in an urban context. They reconstruct cultural heritage models in 3D and over time by using crowd sourced imagery from open access repositories.…”

3D Building Reconstruction using Stereo Camera and Edge Detection

“…The idea for using geodetic techniques combined with images of uncalibrated camera of historic buildings for restoration in archeology is explored in (Ragia et al, 2015). The idea of using images from Flickr and Picasa to build accurate 3D models for archaeological monuments is presented in (Hadjiprocopis et al, 2014). Especially in the archaeology another approach depicts a 5D multimedia digital model using the 3D model in different time frames (Doulamis et al, 2015).…”