Step into the past and take a virtual flight over any part of the world as it appeared in 1939. Discover the charm of historic towns, find family homes, or stroll through your ancestors' gardens. HistoricEarth aims to breathe new life into old maps by rendering them as aerial photos, providing a unique Google Earth-like experience.
Inspired by a vast collection of aerial photographs from the 1930s covering Poland, held by the British government, HistoricEarth seeks to make these valuable historical resources accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, the current licensing restrictions and fees ($20+ per image) put these amazing images out of reach for most. This project is our attempt to break down barriers and make historical aerial photos available to amateurs and professionals alike.
Note: No images from the British WW2 Aerial photo archives were used to train this model.
We utilized the Contrastive Unpaired Translation library for training our model.
To enhance reliability and avoid issues encountered with Google Colab (free), we opted for the $8/month Paperspace Gradient Pro plan for our training environment. So far, we've successfully completed 86 epochs, with a goal to reach at least 200 epochs and evaluate the results.
Total training time thus far: approximately 10 hours
- Expand our collection of early 20th-century maps to cover the entire globe, creating a simulation of Earth as it would have appeared from an airplane in 1939.
- Develop an aerial photo search engine and geolocation tool to easily explore the past.