KeystoneDepth: Visualizing History in 3D

Xuan Luo, Yanmeng Kong, Jason Lawrence, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Steven M. Seitz

Abstract: This paper introduces the largest and most diverse collection of rectified stereo image pairs to the research community, KeystoneDepth, consisting of tens of thousands of stereographs of historical people, events, objects, and scenes between 1860 and 1963. Leveraging the Keystone-Mast raw scans from the California Museum of Photography, we apply multiple processing steps to produce clean stereo image pairs, complete with calibration data, rectification transforms, and depthmaps. A second contribution is a novel approach for view synthesis that runs at real-time rates on a mobile device, simulating the experience of looking through an open window into these historical scenes. We produce results for thousands of antique stereographs, capturing many important historical moments.