Single Image Façade Segmentation and Computational Rephotography of House Images Using Deep Learning

Abstract

Rephotography is the process of recapturing the photograph of a location from the same perspective in which it was captured earlier. A rephotographed image is the best presentation to visualize and study the social changes of a location over time. Traditionally, only expert artists and photographers are capable of generating the rephotograph of any specific location. Manual editing or human eye judgment that is considered for generating rephotographs normally requires a lot of precision, effort and is not always accurate. In the era of computer science and deep learning, computer vision techniques make it easier and faster to perform precise operations to an image. Until now many research methodologies have been proposed for rephotography but none of them is fully automatic. Some of these techniques require manual input by the user or need multiple images of the same location with 3D point cloud data while others are only suggestions to the user to perform rephotography. In historical records/archives most of the time we can find only one 2D image of a certain location. Computational rephotography is a challenge in the case of using only one image of a location captured at different timestamps because it is difficult to find the accurate perspective of a single 2D historical image. Moreover, in the case of building rephotography, it is required to maintain the alignments and regular shape. The features of a building may change over time and in most of the cases, it is not possible to use a features detection algorithm to detect the key features. In this research paper, we propose a methodology to rephotograph house images by combining deep learning and traditional computer vision techniques. The purpose of this research is to rephotograph an image of the past based on a single image. This research will be helpful not only for computer scientists but also for history and cultural heritage research scholars to study the social changes of a location during a specific time period, and it will allow users to go back in time to see how a specific place looked in the past. We have achieved good, fully automatic rephotographed results based on façade segmentation using only a single image.