Oitijjo-3D: Generative AI Framework for Rapid 3D Heritage Reconstruction from Street View Imagery

Abstract

Cultural heritage restoration in Bangladesh faces a dual challenge of limited resources and scarce technical expertise. Traditional 3D digitization methods, such as photogrammetry or LiDAR scanning, require expensive hardware, expert operators, and extensive on-site access, which are often infeasible in developing contexts. As a result, many of Bangladesh's architectural treasures, from the Paharpur Buddhist Monastery to Ahsan Manzil, remain vulnerable to decay and inaccessible in digital form. This paper introduces Oitijjo-3D, a cost-free generative AI framework that democratizes 3D cultural preservation. By using publicly available Google Street View imagery, Oitijjo-3D reconstructs faithful 3D models of heritage structures through a two-stage pipeline - multimodal visual reasoning with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image for structure-texture synthesis, and neural image-to-3D generation through Hexagen for geometry recovery. The system produces photorealistic, metrically coherent reconstructions in seconds, achieving significant speedups compared to conventional Structure-from-Motion pipelines, without requiring any specialized hardware or expert supervision. Experiments on landmarks such as Ahsan Manzil, Choto Sona Mosque, and Paharpur demonstrate that Oitijjo-3D preserves both visual and structural fidelity while drastically lowering economic and technical barriers. By turning open imagery into digital heritage, this work reframes preservation as a community-driven, AI-assisted act of cultural continuity for resource-limited nations.