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Rome, Built In a Day

Posted by timothy on from the what-about-compilation dept.

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."

10 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. As far as I can tell... by KingSkippus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As far as I can tell, after skimming TFA and watching the little demo video, they weren't actually copying the pictures, but using them to build a 3D model.

    It would be kind of like aggregating a bunch of books in the library to come up with a letter distribution chart. You're not violating the copyrights of the authors, just compiling information from raw data.

    1. Re:As far as I can tell... by Z00L00K · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And I hope that they didn't mess up by getting pictures from this Roma.

      It actually has a ruin of a monastery too, so it's easy to get confused.

      And this name confusion has actually caused some mail to take the long way around by having a turnaround in Italy.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    2. Re:As far as I can tell... by CaseyB · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Some interesting questions arise here. Where exactly is the line between aggregate and specific? Would it be OK if they used the photographs to texture the model? Would it depend on how many photographs were averaged to generate the texel?

  2. Cool, but... by Eggplant62 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wish this were done more with free software rather than with help from the Beast from Redmond. 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.

  3. Why O(n squared)? by clone53421 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Previous versions of the Photo Tourism software matched each photo to every other photo in the set.

    If you're building an entire digital model, wouldn't there be some point at which it would be more efficient to match each new photo to the digital model itself (instead of all the other individual photos)? At that point, the 3D model would be nearly complete, and matching new photos would be closer to O(n), as I see it. Additional photos would primarily only increase the detail/resolution of the existing model.

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
  4. Video games by VinylRecords · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Imagine if the God of War team could instantly recreate entire cities like this. Or the Fallout 3 team could snap a few thousand photos of Las Vegas and then digitize an entire city within a day and then work out the kinks. Or the Grand Theft Auto developers could recreate New Yo...ahem, Liberty City and then build a perfect 3D model and just slap textures on the buildings.

    Sure it's not a perfect system but this has so much potential to help recreate cities or terrain within video games.

    1. Re:Video games by MorpheousMarty · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Although your idea is very cool, it would be much easier to use something like the Google Vans to do this. The hard part of this project is figuring out where the cameras were pointing when the pictures were taken. With good geo location information and an electronic compass you can eliminate that, difficult, part of the process. I'm sure if you payed enough you could just license the high quality originals used in street view and do the same thing for a fraction of the cost.

    2. Re:Video games by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The way you get pics isn't really a big deal, the interesting part is software that takes them and makes a 3D model out of it.

      But yeah, combining Street View with Photosynth is an obvious thing that comes to mind.

  5. Re:TED talk with a 2007 version by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Don't give me photosynths. Give me full 3D scans and material inventories so the damn thing can be rebuilt from scratch if need be.

    http://www.david-laserscanner.com/

  6. Using (panoramic) video as data source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The next step would be to use video as the data source, or even panoramic video like the Google Street View cars capture. With such a system, simply driving by a building would provide thousands of frames from a range of viewpoints already. Putting all that together would be immensely computational intensive, but the result would be 3D-models of everything the Google cars have ever filmed.