Engineering Commons^™

Crowdsourcing The Georeferencing Of Historical Pictures, Timothée Produit, Nicolas Blanc, Sarah Composto, Jens Ingensand, Loic Furhoff

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) Conference Proceedings

Countless organizations own archive pictures which are not used due to the difficulty of localizing them. Only the participation of volunteers can help to identify the image content. Through an accessible web interface called smapshot, citizens are able to georeference historical images without any prior specific competence. To avoid the volunteers to face the complexity of 3D digitization and navigation, we implemented a state of the art photogrammetry camera orientation algorithm in the platform. Currently several thousand images from all around Switzerland have been georeferenced by the crowd. At this time the tool is mainly used by the population for …