Slashdot Mirror
Rome, Built In a Day
spmallick writes "Researchers at the University of Washington, in collaboration with Microsoft, have recreated the city of Rome in 3D using images obtained from Flickr. The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated with the tags 'Rome' or 'Roma,' and it took 21 hours on 496 compute cores to create a 3D digital model. Unlike Photosynth / Photo Tourism, the goal was to reconstruct an entire city and not just individual landmarks. Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set. But as the number of photos increases the number of matches explodes, increasing with the square of the number of photos. A set of 250,000 images would take at least a year for 500 computers to process... A million photos would take more than a decade! The newly developed code works more than a hundred times faster than the previous version. It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts."
Photosynth was showcased in a mid 2007 TED talk. You can find it here.
It would be nice to have photosynths of monuments, art, or architecture that have been damaged or destroyed (e.g. the Buddhas dynamited in Afghanistan, the churches that collapsed in the 2009 Italy earthquake) from tourist photos that may be floating out in the interwebs.
No, it's designed to help you find images of a particular location and then it shows you the original photos. The 3d model part is kinda misleading as they're just using it to calculate the relative positions of where the pictures were taken and then browse it like a giant 3d menu. The summary gave me the impression that they built a photo realistic 3d model of the city, but it's just a glorified image browser. You could argue it's like Google image search, but it seems that they did actually copy the pictures instead of just linking to the originals on Flickr. Still, it's some pretty neat photo processing.
The teams actual site has more pics and videos, including St. Peter's Basilica, Trevi Fountain, and info on Venice.
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/