Processing historic aerial imagery mosaics

Question

I'd like to process multiple sets of old (>1938) aerial imagery that are scanned, but whether merged nor georeferenced. While I had good results with QGIS to align single photos, using passpoints, this doesn't scale for all the tiles and lacks preprocessing steps:

• remove film-frame
• align all photos to each other
• choose / combine overlapping areas
• composite and color adjustments
• georeference using passpoints + global coordinates

Is there any free / open source toolchain, that can deal with all that?

A user-interface as huginn would be brilliant, but CLI + tutorial could do the job. My approach would be to use GIMP to create a single image (incl. preprocessing), align it using QGIS and create the final GeoTIFF. While the results are only for visual compare and will be embedded within an WMS, I don't need the highest accuracy and would preffer an solution that I can use with my limited knowledge in raster processing. Rectifieng the result is not required.

Unfortunately I don't own the calibration-infos for the cameras, so tools as MicMac doesn't seem to work. The Orfeo toolbox seems to be focused on detecting passpoints and perform the feature analysis :-/

Answer 1

To make it short, I didn't found an proper open source solution. Some overview:

• GRASS GIS - has all support, but different docs are confusing and tool is to complex
• orfeo Toolbox - designed for working with camera sensors, doesn't seem to work, if calibration is unknown
• OSSIM - no current binary release, old ones doesn't seem to work
• Mic mac - needs calibration data, writing config files by hand, seems to be unusable to me

I was glad and got support by an university collegues who has licensed an commercial application that worked pretty well.

Answer 2

Some updates: I used WebODM by OpenAerialMap, which worked fine. Only defining GroundControllPoints was not that straigtht forward and took some work. Results are pretty, without further adjustments