HS-2: Procedural Reconstruction of Historical Waterscapes from Archival Sources — A Technical Pipeline

Historical photographs of waterways, harbours, and coastlines survive in archives worldwide, but reconstructing these lost waterscapes as interactive three-dimensional environments remains unsolved: archival photographs are sparse, single-angle, and captured with unknown camera parameters, while existing reconstruction methods require either multiple overlapping views or restrict output to planar facades. This paper proposes a pipeline that bridges the gap through three contributions. First, multi-angle hallucination: an AI video generation model synthesises a plausible camera orbit from a single archival photograph, and the resulting frames are submitted to a conventional Structure from Motion pipeline as a…