ARephotography: Revisiting Historical Photographs using Augmented Reality

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) opens up new possibilities for interactive experiences which can be used in a variety of circumstances. Rephotography is a photo technique commonly presented on dedicated internet pages that align a past view with a current photo, allowing you to have a comparative view of the past with the present. This project aims to combine these two concepts to create AR experiences where you can view buildings and street views from historical photography seamlessly embedded in the present environment. We report on our automated pipeline that can take a historical photograph of a building and produces a textured 3D model that can be placed in AR over the current view of the building using techniques from machine learning while also reporting on first feedback from a preliminary user study.