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."

Comments

legality

[timpdx]

IANAL, but is this legal? I somehow think that Microsoft doesn't have 150K photographer releases in their paws.

Re:Cool, but...

[westlake]

I'm certain the faculty at UW are completely familiar enough with free software that they could have made this work without MS's help.

150,000 photos. 21 Hours. 496 Cores. That makes it a labor intensive, computation intensive project. None of that comes "free as in beer."

Still just a point cloud?

[grumbel]

It is nice to see that they have optimized the algorithm, but what about the presentation? It looks like it is still just a point cloud, just as it was two years ago. Why isn't it a fully textured 3d model? It shouldn't be that hard to do that when you already have the points in 3d.

Re:Still just a point cloud?

[mrchaotica]

Why isn't it a fully textured 3d model? It shouldn't be that hard to do that when you already have the points in 3d.

You might have answered your own question: since developing an algorithm like marching cubes is a solved problem, slapping it on as a post-processing step wouldn't really count as research. These academics are trying to make a cool demo to show off their research, not create a finished product. If they waste too much time polishing it, they risk not getting enough real research done and losing their funding.

Re:As far as I can tell...

[harlows_monkeys]

How is the image of the Coliseum shown in either of the linked articles not a 3D model of said building?

Sure it does

[SuperKendall]

...None of that comes "free as in beer."...

150,000 photos.

From Flickr. It's not like some poor bastard was paid to be out there photographing for weeks.

21 Hours. 496 Cores.

Don't recall folding@home or seti@home paying me anything.

In short - who wouldn't pony up a few days of computing power to have a fully open 3D model of some of earths greatest landmarks? We only need someone to do the code to distribute, but the basic framework for distributed computation is already in place.