A robot-assisted pipeline to rapidly scan 1.7 million historical aerial photographs

Abstract During the 20th Century, aerial surveys captured hundreds of millions of high-resolution photographs of the Earth’s surface. These images, the precursors to modern satellite imagery, represent an extraordinary visual record of the environmental and social upheavals of the 20th Century. However, most of these images currently languish in physical archives where retrieval is difficult and costly. Digitization could revolutionize access, but manual scanning is slow and expensive. Automated scanning could make at-scale digitization feasible, unlocking this visual record of the 20th Century for the digital era. Here, we describe and validate a novel robot-assisted pipeline that increases worker productivity in scanning 30-fold, applied at scale to digitize an archive of 1.7 million historical aerial photographs from 65 countries.