Abstract
Historical aerial images are a unique and relatively unexplored means of deriving spatio-temporal information for scenes and landscapes. Such historical imagery can be combined with photointerpretation and image-based 3D modelling techniques, providing the fourth dimension of time to 3D geometrical representations. This allows urban planners, historians, and other specialists to identify, describe, and analyse changes in scenes and landscapes. Urban growth has an important impact on the sustainable development of cities. An important step for the analysis of urban growth is the identification of different urban sectors. To this end, this paper proposes a methodology for the 4D urban growth analysis of cities through time using a free and open source software developed by the authors. This approach uses the latest advances in photogrammetry, including the so-called incremental Structure from Motion, to evaluate the urbanistic changes of a city by means of confronting two-point clouds from different eras. The objectives of this paper are twofold: (i) first, the processing of historical aerial images using modern photogrammetric techniques; (ii) second, deriving spatio-temporal information for urban cities, offering a method for researchers to identify changes over time. In order to validate this method, the urban growth of the city of Avila between 1956 and 2017 was assessed taking the historical American flight of 1956 and the digital aerial flight of 2017. The results were statistically assessed according to georeferencing quality, confirming that the approach developed can be used to support urban growth analysis through time and providing relevant data in 2D and 3D.
Highlights
Cities and towns are temporary expressions of the social, economic, and cultural history of the population that lives and works within them
This paper proposes a methodology for the 4D urban growth analysis of cities through time using a free and open source software developed by the authors
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approaches and tools have an important limitation when using historical information as a main input and when vertical analysis is required. This vertical component can be included as an attribute, classical GIS approaches cannot exploit the three-dimensional geometry [15,16] which is crucial in the urban growth analysis of cities
Summary
Cities and towns are temporary expressions of the social, economic, and cultural history of the population that lives and works within them. These photointerpretations were carried out completely manually through user inspection, while in the second case only 2D measurements were extracted (e.g., distances and surfaces) The latter requires a certain level of expertise in order to apply general methods in photogrammetry [18], obtaining a means of performing dimensional analyses on urban cities. The combination of photogrammetry and computer vision in modern photogrammetry [19,20] has made numerous advances towards the automation of general photogrammetric methods possible This allows the analyst to obtain textured 3D models from a set of images without the need to know the camera’s calibration parameters. A final section is devoted to highlighting the main conclusions and future trends
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