Faroe Islands rephotography image registration dataset

Over 200 georeferenced registered rephotographic compila-tions of the Faroe Islands are provided in this dataset. The position of each compilation is georeferenced and thus lo-catable on a map. Each compilation consists of a historical and a corresponding contemporary image showing the same scene. With steady object features, these two images of the same geolocation are aligned pixel accurately. In the summer of 2022, all contemporary images were photographed by A. Schaffland, while historical images were retrieved from the National Museum of Denmark collections. Images show Faroese landscape and cultural heritage sites, focusing on relevant areas when the historical images were taken, e.g., Kirkjubour, Torshavn, and Saksun. Historic images date from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. The historical images were taken by scientists, surveyors, archaeologists, and painters. All historical images are in the public domain, have no known rights, or are shared under a CC license. The contem-porary images by A. Schaffland are released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.The dataset is organized as a GIS project. Historic images, not already georeferenced, were referenced with street view ser-vices. All historical images were added to the GIS database, containing camera position, viewing direction, etc. Each com-pilation can be displayed as an arrow from the camera posi-tion along the view direction on a map. Contemporary im-ages were registered to historical images using a specialized tool. None or only a suboptimal rephotograph could be taken for some historical images. These historical images are still added to the database together with all other original im-ages, providing additional data for improvements in repho-tography methods in the upcoming years. The resulting image pairs can be used in image registration, landscape change, urban development, and cultural heritage research. Further, the database can be used for public en-gagement in heritage and as a benchmark for further repho-tography and time-series projects.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)