Various countries are digitizing their archives of aerial images, going back to the 40's. These historical aerial images are a unique and relatively unexplored means to chronicle land-cover information over the past 100 years with very high spatial resolution. Such data provide a relatively dense temporal sampling of the territories. 3D information can even be retrieved since many surveys were performed under photogrammetric conditions. Therefore, both long-term environmental monitoring studies and historical object detection can be based on the analysis of these very rich time series of images. The activity feature various open issues related to the geo-processing of historical aerial images, including automatic processing, feature identification and extraction, maps generation, etc.

Related to this research activities, the TIME benchmark/dataset has been established in collaboration with EuroSDR.

Representative Publications:

- Farella, E.M., Morelli, L., Remondino, F., Mills, J., Haala, N., Crompvoets, J., 2022: THE EUROSDR TIME BENCHMARK FOR HISTORICAL AERIAL IMAGES. Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. - ISPRS Congress 2022

- Nocerino, E., Menna, F., Remondino, F., 2012: Multi-temporal analysis of landscapes and urban areas. Int. Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol. 39(4), pp. 85-90

Related events:

- 1st EuroSDR workshop on Geoprocessing and Archiving of Historical Aerial Images, 3-4 June 2019, Paris (France)

- 2nd EuroSDR workshop on Geoprocessing and Archiving of Historical Aerial Images, 5-6 Dec 2022, Rome (Italy)