Generation of a 3D city model of Baalbek/Lebanon based on historical photos

A groundbreaking strategy for generating high-accuracy 3D city models from historical photographs has been developed, enabling the integrated mapping of UNESCO World Heritage Sites like Baalbek. This approach overcomes challenges posed by varying image qualities, camera parameters, and capture conditions—such as differing scales, flight heights, and unknown lens distortions—by employing a multi-stage photogrammetric method. The core innovation lies in combining historical images through bundle adjustment algorithms to determine inner and outer orientation parameters with precision, even when metadata (e.g., camera specifications) is absent. The resulting 3D reconstructions achieve sufficient accuracy for CityGML-based modeling at multiple levels of detail (LODs), while semantic enrichment enhances the model's analytical value for studying urban evolution. This work demonstrates that historical imagery can be leveraged to produce geometrically robust and semantically rich digital twins, advancing heritage documentation and preservation.

Alamouri, A. (2011). Generation of a 3D city model of Baalbek/Lebanon based on historical photos. Technische Universität Berlin. https://doi.org/10.14279/DEPOSITONCE-2742