KeystoneDepth: Visualizing History in 3D

TL;DR

KeystoneDepth provides a large, curated collection of historical stereo images and introduces a real-time view synthesis method for immersive visualization of historical scenes on mobile devices.

Contribution

It offers the largest diverse stereo image dataset of historical scenes and a novel real-time view synthesis technique for mobile visualization.

Findings

Large dataset of historical stereo images created

Real-time view synthesis demonstrated on mobile devices

Enhanced visualization of historical scenes achieved

Abstract

This paper introduces the largest and most diverse collection of rectified stereo image pairs to the research community, KeystoneDepth, consisting of tens of thousands of stereographs of historical people, events, objects, and scenes between 1860 and 1963. Leveraging the Keystone-Mast raw scans from the California Museum of Photography, we apply multiple processing steps to produce clean stereo image pairs, complete with calibration data, rectification transforms, and depthmaps. A second contribution is a novel approach for view synthesis that runs at real-time rates on a mobile device, simulating the experience of looking through an open window into these historical scenes. We produce results for thousands of antique stereographs, capturing many important historical moments.