Feature Matching for Aligning Historical and Modern Images

Provision of historical information based on geographical location represents a new scope of connecting the present of a certain location or landmark with its history through a timescape panorama. This may be achieved by exploring a linear timeline of photos for certain areas and landmarks that have both historic and modern photos. Matching modern to historical images requires a special effort in the sense of dealing with historical photos which were captured by photographers of different skills using cameras from a wide range of photographic technology eras. While there are many effective matching techniques which are vectoror binarybased that perform effectively on modern digital images, they are not accurate on historic photos. Photos of different landmarks were gathered on a wide ranging timeline taken in different conditions of illumination, position, and weather. This work examines the problem of matching historical photos with modern photos of the same landmarks with the intent of hopefully registering the images to build a timescape panorama. Images were matched using standard vector-based matching techniques and binary-based techniques. Match results of these sets of images were recorded and analysed. Generally, these results show successful matching of the modern digital images, while matching historic photos to modern ones shows poor matching results. A novel application of a hybrid ORB/SURF matching technique was applied in matching modern to historic images and showed more accurate results and performs more effectively.