I just started my internship at PreserveMy.World, a project focused on digitally preserving cultural heritage sites using technology. This is my first week and I spent it setting up my environment and diving into 3D reconstruction research.
What is PreserveMy.World?
PreserveMy.World aims to digitally preserve real places — historical buildings, heritage sites, and landmarks — so they can be experienced even if they're damaged or lost. 3D reconstruction is at the heart of this mission.
The 5 Methods I Researched
1. COLMAP / Structure-from-Motion
Takes multiple photos of the same place from different angles and builds a 3D point cloud. Good for reconstructing buildings from tourist photos.
2. NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields)
Uses a neural network to learn how a scene looks from any angle. Produces photorealistic results but needs a strong GPU.
3. Gaussian Splatting
A newer, faster alternative to NeRF. Produces high quality real-time 3D scenes with fewer photos.
4. Monocular Depth Estimation
Estimates depth from just ONE photo. The easiest to get started with — no special equipment needed.
5. Multi-View Stereo
Uses multiple calibrated photos to build a dense 3D mesh. Good for detailed artifact models.
My Experiment — Monocular Depth Estimation on Google Colab
I decided to start with monocular depth estimation since it only needs one image and runs free on Colab.
I used the Depth-Anything-V2 model from HuggingFace to run depth estimation on a synthetic image I created with Python.
The result was really cool — the model correctly identified which parts of the image were closer and which were further away, shown through a plasma color map (yellow = close, purple = far).
What Failed
My first two attempts failed because I tried downloading images from Wikipedia URLs which got blocked. I fixed it by generating a synthetic image using Python's PIL library instead.
What I Learned
- Monocular depth estimation is a great entry point into 3D reconstruction
- You don't need expensive hardware to get started — free Colab works fine
- For PreserveMy.World, this could be used to get quick depth previews of heritage site photos
GitHub Repo
All my code, research notes, and experiment outputs are in my repo:
https://github.com/HumnaAttique/PMW-day1
Next Steps
I want to try COLMAP next week with real photos, and eventually work toward NeRF or Gaussian Splatting for more realistic heritage site reconstructions.
