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Centre for Digital Built Britain completed its five-year mission and closed its doors at the end of September 2022

This website remains as a legacy of the achievements of our five-year foundational journey towards a digital built Britain
 

This research project has used advanced image processing and computer vision techniques to recreate geospatial viewpoints of some historic, 17th century David Loggan line drawings of Cambridge Colleges. Subsequent drone flights then captured current images of the colleges from these same viewpoints.

Final Report

Executive Summary

This research project has used advanced image processing and computer vision techniques to recreate geospatial viewpoints of some historic, 17th century David Loggan line drawings of Cambridge Colleges. Subsequent drone flights then captured current images of the colleges from these same viewpoints.

Using some Cambridge colleges as examples, we show that we are then able to overlay the image and the drawing, highlighting differences and similarities. This leads to interesting questions in the field of history-of-architecture and paves the way for more complete structural and architectural analysis of such historical buildings. Additionally, we have shown that the automatic inclusion of lines (as well as points) in the extraction of 3D data from drone footage, can improve camera localisation and lead to reconstructions of higher accuracy.

Autonomous Image Recapture image
Clare College, overlaying Loggan sketch and drone photograph

Final Report

Researchers


Department of Architecture


Department of Engineering

Hugo Hadfield
Department of Engineering and Architecture


ARM