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We investigate in this paper how historical maps can be \u2018augmented\u2019 with the third dimension so that buildings have heights, volumes, and roof shapes. The resulting 3D city models, also known as <jats:italic>digital twins<\/jats:italic>, have several benefits in practice since it is known that some spatial analyses are only possible in 3D: visibility studies, wind flow analyses, population estimation, etc. At this moment, reconstructing historical models is (mostly) a manual and very time-consuming operation, and it is plagued by inaccuracies in the 2D maps. In this paper, we present a new methodology to reconstruct 3D buildings from historical maps, we developed it with the aim of automating the process as much as possible, and we discuss the engineering decisions we made when implementing it. Our methodology uses extra datasets for height extraction, reuses the 3D models of buildings that still exist, and infers other buildings with procedural modelling. We have implemented and tested our methodology with real-world historical maps of European cities for different times between 1700 and 2000.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s44212-022-00011-3","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,21]],"date-time":"2022-10-21T11:06:14Z","timestamp":1666350374000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":11,"title":["Reconstructing historical 3D city models"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"1","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9085-0591","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Camille","family":"Morlighem","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2672-1220","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Anna","family":"Labetski","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1251-8654","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hugo","family":"Ledoux","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,10,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"11_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Arkin, E. 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