Identifying Historic Buildings over Time through Image Matching

The buildings in a city are of great importance. Certain historic buildings are landmarks and indicate the city’s architecture and culture. The buildings over time undergo changes because of various factors, such as structural changes, natural disaster damages, and aesthetic interventions. The form of buildings in each period is perceived and understood by people of each generation, through photography. Nevertheless, each photograph has its own characteristics depending on the camera (analog or digital) used for capturing it. Any photo, even depicting the same object, is impossible to capture in the same way in terms of illumination, viewing angle, and scale. Hence, to study two or more photographs depicting the same object, first they should be identified and then properly matched. Nowadays, computer vision contributes to this process by providing useful tools. In particular, for this purpose, several feature detection and description algorithms of homologous points have been developed. In this study, the identification of historic buildings over time through feature correspondence techniques and methods is investigated. Especially, photographs from landmarks of Drama city, in Greece, on different dates and conditions (weather, light, rotation, scale, etc.), were gathered and experiments on 2D pairs of images, implementing traditional feature detectors and descriptors algorithms, such as SIFT, ORB, and BRISK, were carried out. This study aims to evaluate the feature matching procedure focusing on both the algorithms’ performance (accuracy, efficiency, and robustness) and the identification of the buildings. SIFT and BRISK are the most accurate algorithms while ORB and BRISK are the most efficient.