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Recreating Cities Using Online Photos

Posted by Zonk on from the taking-a-walkabout dept.

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."

9 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Re:seen this by Sectrish · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yep, it was Photosynth, a cool looking project from a company bought by microsoft. It's site is: http://labs.live.com/Photosynth.aspx

  2. How about telling us what it's called? by BertieBaggio · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    1. Re:How about telling us what it's called? by Aaron+England · · Score: 5, Informative

      Is Photosynth "owned" by Microsoft? I thought Microsoft only acquired Seadragon and that Photosynth was a joint project between UW and Microsoft.

    2. Re:How about telling us what it's called? by BertieBaggio · · Score: 5, Informative

      Mod parent up. I thought MS had bought both, but Photosynth is collaborative research by Noah Snavely (undergrad at UW), Steve Seitz (also UW), and Richard Szeliski (from Microsoft Research). Maybe in six months time I'll be retroactively correct when they do buy it...

      (from http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ and http://labs.live.com/photosynth/aboutus.html)

      --
      If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
  3. Nope, not photosynth... by tommyhj · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!!

  4. Re:seen this by WalterGR · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yep, it was Photosynth, a cool looking project from a company bought by microsoft.

    No. Photosynth is a collaboration between the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. See here.

    --
    The Online Slang Dictionary
  5. Re:Does it work with people? by Squalish · · Score: 5, Informative

    We certainly have software that can take a video of static objects and turn it into a 3d scene.

    We have, in TFA, software that can take frames of static objects, remove the dynamic objects among them, and leave us with a 3d scene.

    We probably have software that can interpolate a static object which is bounding a nonstatic/elastic layer (the shape of a statue under a swaying tarp, the dimensions of a box inside a grocery bag someone is swinging).

    We probably do not, however, have software that can efficiently calculate the at-rest dimensions of an elastic, mobile object(Jessica Alba) beneath a nonstatic/elastic layer (clothes). We've just barely reached the point where we can depict the behavior of the squishy, bony, muscular, hairy human body accurately, much less interpolate a hidden body.

    One wonders what it would cost to develop such software to the satisfaction of a pervert, compared to what it would cost to simply fund a movie where the pervert gets to do this.

    --
    People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
  6. I'll see your 3D city and raise you a D. by gt384u · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  7. Differences with Photosynth by snavely · · Score: 4, Informative

    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