Abstract
Abstract. The paper aims at discussing the accuracy of perspective restitution from view camera photos; view cameras are non-standard cameras frequently used in the past century for on field shooting of buildings and urban sites; this is why the reconstruction of lost buildings often deals with photos taken with a view camera. The case study chosen for the proposed experiment is an urban complex built in Palermo in the ‘50s. The site features a very regular layout with surfaces at right angle, that supports the graphic reconstruction of photos’ inner and outer orientation. The site has been surveyed with a laser scanner; the point cloud provided the metric information needed for the evaluation of the accuracy of perspective restitution. The experiment used three sets of photos: a photo taken by Studio Alinari in the ‘60s; a couple of photos taken during the research work with a view camera; a photo taken with a standard mirrorless camera.The results of the experiment prove that view cameras do not modify the projective layout of perspective and that the accuracy of restitution from view camera photos is comparable to the accuracy of restitution from images taken with a standard camera.
Highlights
Digital surveying and representation make perspective restitution from photos an effective tool for the reconstruction of buildings that no longer exist and are pictured in a single or in few period photos (Fig. 1).Fig. 1: 3D perspective restitution from period photos
If the photographer aims at capturing the image of a building with the vertical lines parallel to each other, the camera has to be set on a levelled tripod and the shooting axe has to be perfectly horizontal; it is easy to suppose that this condition is almost impossible, especially when photos are taken on field
Digital representation tools overcome many of the limitations that made perspective restitution inadequate to the reconstruction of buildings depicted in photographic images; it is worth mentioning that one of the limitations of pre-digital restitution precisely regarded the identification of the vanishing point of vertical lines
Summary
Digital surveying and representation make perspective restitution from photos an effective tool for the reconstruction of buildings that no longer exist and are pictured in a single or in few period photos (Fig. 1).Fig. 1: 3D perspective restitution from period photos. If the photographer aims at capturing the image of a building with the vertical lines parallel to each other, the camera has to be set on a levelled tripod and the shooting axe has to be perfectly horizontal; it is easy to suppose that this condition is almost impossible, especially when photos are taken on field. This is why vertical lines are rarely parallel to each other in photographic images and meet in a vanishing point. In some experiments where the restitution process was developed on full format, untrimmed photos, taken in the first decades of the past century, the inner orientation process produced the principal point in an eccentric position
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