Heritage and Repeat Photography: Techniques, Management, Applications, and Publications

Abstract

Repeat photography, the process of locating the camera position of an old photo and taking a new photo from this position, is utilized to protect our natural heritage, by measuring landscape changes between old and new image, and to conserve and recover our architectural and archaeological heritage, by observing changes between images taken before, during, and after conservation efforts or destructive events. Most importantly, repeat photography—in short, rephotography—is connecting us to our heritage on all levels from personal to global: while rephotographing, we connect with the old image and its creator and—when viewing and comparing the old image and the rephotograph—we connect with the tangible, intangible, and natural heritage shown in the images by observing changes and continuities. In this paper, we review publications and applications employing rephotography. We discuss the organization, retrieval, and presentation of rephotographic compilations, their generation by different image registration techniques, and their conservation as rephotographic heritage. Further, we describe challenges in rephotography, discuss how they differ from standard challenges in photography, computer vision, and image registration and present both analog and digital solutions and tools used in practice by rephotographers to address said challenges.