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Recreating Cities Using Online Photos
Roland Piquepaille writes "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."
i think i have seen this somewhere before, i just dont remember where
This story is a bit old (well, it's from Roland after all). There was a demo of this tech by Blaise Aguera y Arcas at TED earlier this year. the two underlying components are Seadragon and Photosynth, both of which are mighty impressive. Also, despite the Mozilla-esque name 'Seadragon', both of these technologies are actually owned by Microsoft. There is a tech preview of Photosynth up for download, but I don't think Seadragon is available yet.
There is a video of the TED demo, which shows off some of the things Seadragon and Photosynth can do, the including Notre Dame example mentioned in T(second)FA. The talk is also on YouTube.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
This is Microsoft Photosynth; covered on /. multiple times already.
It looks like an incredible idea with a lot of promise, but the shots they've shown so far look like some lumpy rejects from a plastic vacuum forming machine. There is some great potential here to involve people to generate better models by asking them to contribute pics of certain monuments with certain characteristics such as resolution, position and so on.
Only a terrorist would want a 3d map of a city. This must be stopped.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Online photos of any physical location on any planet in the local galactic group are now forbidden due to the possibility that the photos might be used by terrorists or those who may be helping terrorists to plan terrorist attacks on said locations.
By order of Ultra Super Secret Chief Intelligence Officer, Department of Homeland Security
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Or pre-invasion Fallujah, or New Orleans 1999?
I wonder how many photos it needs of an object to produce a decent model and if the software will ever be released to the public - it would be amazing to be able to produce a 3d model of an object just by snapping a bunch of photos from different angles and bunging them into a piece of software. (I know there are things to create a model using a video camera and a turntable, but that's not quite as easy as being able to grab your camera anywhere and make a model.)
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This has nothing to do with the Photosynth/seadragon project, other than the fact that both teams use a whole bunch of different photos of the same object/setting.
This approach tries to make the actual 3D objects from a bunch of 2D photos of varying quality. Photosynth just tried to MAP the photos in a rough 3D space. Making the actual 3D model to any degree of accuracy is really a challenge when you can't control the input images.
The goal is different in the two cases, but they should definitely get together and exchange technologies and algorithms, because I SO much want this tech built into Google Earth!!
If so, I think it's time to rent a few Jessica Alba movies.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
After the 2nd war, Warsaw was rebuilt from photos. If you visit Warsaw today, you'd think that it is an old city. In fact, it is all new, the Poles just like it that way.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What will this software do with all the goatse images on the World Wide Wibble?
Keep in mind that Microsoft didn't single-handedly come up with these technologies; their work is based on decades of work in user interfaces and image processing at many institutions.
Photogrametry still seems extremely labor intensive. U can't just throw a bunch of photos at the computer and get 3D worlds out. The difference seems to be much cheaper labor than 2002. U can throw a bunch of photos at a legion of Indian artists and get 3D worlds for free.
It's a little harder with a single camera, positioned at free-form positions in space; to make it easy, you'd need to figure out a way for an AI to automatically figure out what points correlated between two pictures. Not a trivial task.
I was thinking that Steve Mann had solved that, but on looking up his paper it seems that he's only addressed a couple of special cases.
There's a professor in my building who works on constructing spatio-temporal representations of information from 2D images that allow you to see a city evolve through time. Not sure if all their demos are on the website, but the ones I've seen are pretty ridiculous. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/4d-cities/dhtml/index.html
I'm so ashamed. Please pardon the vernacular. I meant "novel" and "interesting" and "brilliant" and "amazing" and "cool" and "neat" and "awesome"... Ass.
Now the newly sentient Google, will have a 3D understanding of the world it will soon control! It already has access tol the world's data, now it will gain a new "perspective" with all the images at its disposal.
If it's reading this I'm sure it'll keep it from being modded up.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
You'll notice the Notre Dame model was of the endlessly photographed front aspect.
I wonder how much detail such a technique can pull on the rear of the building? Or the back of Rodin's Kiss? How about the top surfaces of the Statue of Liberty?
Of course that won't stop CSI, next season, from pulling a bunch of pictures from Flickr of the front exterior of a building, reconstructing a complete 3D model, open accurately hinging doors, travelling inside, going down in to the basement and looking at the reflection in someone's eye to identify the killer.
Cause they're gonna need it to finish their work.
The game.
I was a co-author on this work -- it's great to see it on Slashdot =)
I also worked on the Photo Tourism project (which is related to Photosynth). There's a big difference between Photosynth and this new 3D reconstruction work, in that Photosynth takes a photo collection and reconstructs camera positions and a sparse point cloud (a set of disconnected 3D points floating in space), while in this new work we build *dense* 3D models of scenes (in the form of polygon meshes). Dense models are usually much better for use in applications like computer graphics, since they can be used to render scenes with much more photo-realism.
These two problems require different algorithms to solve---for this dense problem we use a technique called multi-view stereo, but we made it work with images taken by many different people under different conditions.
- Noah
Where can I download the software? Is there a open source project on this?
Over the years I have seen many different attempts from reconstructing scenes from digital pictures, some of them being very impressive, but for some reason I have never been able to find a working piece of software or a open source project dealing with this. Yes, there are several nice frame works available. Or I am I just looking in the wrong places? I did find some commercial packages, but these are beyond my budget.
Is there some reason why researchers in this direction are not willing to donate their results to the public? Or is it just coincidence.
This method of modelling has actually been around for some time in the consumer arena, going back to the mid-to-late 90's. The earliest one I can think of was from a company called MetaCreations (formerly Specular, the makers of Carrara Studio's older cousin, Infini-D). However, I can't recall the name of the software that did the photo-to-model stuff. I do know it functioned very similar to Google's SketchUp, which does the exact same thing.
Google's setup is a bit more grandiose in scale though. They're hoping SketchUp users will create models of landmarks, businesses and homes in their communities using various photos, then share the resulting models for inclusion on a geographically accurate version of Google Earth.
Once finished, Google Earth may be able to provide a time accurate, browseable 3D version of any location on the planet.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Interesting how ingrained the "MS bought it" mindset is. Looks like a blind spot that's going to catch some people unawares in the future.
I checked this out last week - supposed 3D of Nasa in Florida - it's not 3D it's panaramic. Nothing groundbreaking whatsoever. In fact, why waste tiem with this? Google Earth/Maps has been working on this and it' much better - you can 'drive' down the street and check out locations.
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Why wait for it to be built into Google Earth when it is already built into Live Maps?
Neil
Like, looking at the model of Notre Damn, I was thinking, surely someone has taken pictures of the sculptures over the door. The model looks like a blob. And you are not really plotting entire 3D landscapes, but, from what it looks like, creating 3D models of single structures, and you are not even adding color. I mean, at least the Microsoft project creates 3D landscapes. I think the two projects should merge, then you could have 3D models with actual picture overlays.
I don't know, I have just seen so many similar projects lately, this just does not wow me.
The key point is that the software can sort the photos and then use them to create the model with minimal intervention.
Where it can help a lot, is for system such as google maps, where only a few 3D models have been made. With such a system, a couple of machine could pull photographs out of a free photo database like picasa (which is already linked from Google Earth) and use the pictures to create preliminary gross "3D" models that can be subsequently put back into google earth. (until some artist design nice refined models).
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