“Computational rephotography is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The “computational” part is when software helps out.
I’m a sucker for photos of old street scenes. Seeing familiar parts of your city as they were many decades ago is fascinating, and if people are good enough to snap a new version, you can enjoy the differences of places you have never seen. At Flickr and a site called Historypin, you can see the old shots lined up over the new, like a window into the past.
Researchers at MIT have found a way to automate the process. Currently, they use a laptop to do the heavy lifting, but the software could just as easily sit inside a camera. In fact, that’s the plan. The system compares the scene in front of the camera with a historical photograph. It then works out the difference between the two and gives the photographer instructions along the lines of “up a bit, left a bit more.”
According to an abstract on rephotography, it is a lot more complicated than it seems. In lining up the images you must consider “six degrees of freedom of 3-D translation and rotation, and the confounding similarity between the effects of camera zoom and dolly”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @LairyT)
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Don’t all photographs let you see into the past, already? And I thought Dolly had died.
Seriously, this is a clever bit of work and very handy for amateur historians everywhere.
There’ll probably be an iPhone app for that soon.
I’ve had a camera for ages that can produce images from the past… For many years now, I have often reflected on passed events by looking at scenes stored on a paper recipticle for images. Some people have called these past images “photos”
have peole at MIT not got better things to do?
oh wow. now we can fake history too!
Seems a bit clunky… left a bit, right a bit… why not just have a blank piece of white card or green then let take your picture and let the software add in the photo from the past and resize accordingly.. you could even just hold up your blank card.. then connect to a db containing all photos and select an appropriate photo…)
Bit of a coincidence that you’ve posted this as my mother and father in law are returning to the church they got married in to renew their vows and have asked me to retake some of their original wedding photos. Me and my FiL have been umming and ahhing about the lens and other aspects such as height of the camera in an attempt to replicate the photos.
Unfortunately I don’t have the help of MIT and their computer and will be relying solely on educated guesswork, so wish me luck!
Chris Armstrong says:
July 29, 2010 at 10:29 am
There’ll probably be an iPhone app for that soon.
“Want your camera to be able to see into the past?… Well theres an app for that, On the NEW iPhone 5 Coming 2011″
I can see it now…
(please note i dont hate Apple i love them XD)
What a weird thing to even dream up…