Coloring the Past: Neural Historical Monuments Reconstruction from Archival Photography

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Historical monuments are a treasure and milestone of cultural heritage. Reconstructing the 3D models of these buildings holds significant value. The rapid development of neural rendering methods makes it possible to recover the original 3D shape exclusively based on archival photographs. However, this task presents considerable challenges due to the properties of available color images. Historical pictures are often limited in number and the scenes in these photos might have altered over time. The radiometric quality of these images is often sub-optimal for using automatic methods. To address these challenges, we introduce an approach to reconstruct the geometry of historical buildings from limited input images. We leverage dense point clouds as a geometric prior and introduce a color appearance embedding loss in volumetric rendering to recover the color of the building. We aim for our work to spark increased interest and focus on preserving historic buildings. Together with the proposed method, we introduce a new historical dataset of the Hungarian National Theater, providing a new benchmark for 3D reconstruction. Please check our project page https://sangluisme.github.io/publications/historical_building/.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPattern Recognition
EditorsDaniel Cremers, Zorah Lähner, Michael Moeller, Matthias Nießner, Björn Ommer, Rudolph Triebel
Pages55–71
Number of pages17
ISBN (electronic)978-3-031-85187-2
Publication statusPublished - 2025
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume15298
ISSN0302-9743

External IDs

unpaywall 10.1007/978-3-031-85187-2_4
Mendeley 745d23c9-b639-39eb-b234-763690adaf79
Scopus 105004253903

Keywords

Keywords

  • 3D reconstruction, Historical monuments, Neural rendering