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."
IANAL, but is this legal? I somehow think that Microsoft doesn't have 150K photographer releases in their paws.
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.
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.
So you're saying they sped their program up by a factor of 100 by replacing a quadratic algorithm with an algorithm for an NP-complete problem?
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.
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.
The research team also announced their next project: Natalie Portman 3D based on the actress of the same name. The team is asking geeks everywhere for their assistance in providing pictures of her, and of course, grits.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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/
It would have been even faster if they'd have started with the edges and leaved the sky for the end like in any other puzzle.
FTFS:
It first establishes likely matches and then concentrates on those parts."
Sounds like when you are putting together a jigsaw puzzle and you find the edge pieces first and work in from there.
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.
....but it would have been if the first coat had dried.
My web domain.
Aren't humans just awesome?
We build amazing structures that last over a thousand years of constant wear and we invent photography to capture the awe inspiring moments that such marvelous creations cast upon ourselves, then create computers to recreate their 3D Dimensions almost perfectly in a virtual environment using nothing but our pictures that we've taken and our impressive ingenuity.
If you can read this: Pat yourself on the back.
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.
The impressive part of this isn't the 3d reconstruction (that's been done many times before, though perhaps not on this scale), it's that they've done it with such a disorganized, incomplete data set as flikr. Using Google Street View data (particularly with the locations already known) would be computationally much easier, but requires paying people to drive around with cameras on the roof.
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.
Can this be used for Pr0n?
...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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hereby declare this It's-Okay-to-Like-Microsoft-For-a-Day Day. This is pretty cool.
Property is theft.
If it takes a year for 500 computers, does that mean it'd take a month for 6,000 computers, or a day for 182,500 computers, or an hour for 4,380,000 computers?
Or, in other words, the original version would cost about $438,000 of EC2 time.
The new version takes 21 hours on 496 cores -- again, could you do it in an hour on 10,416 cores? And that becomes $1,416 of EC2 time.
So, it's not 100 times faster, just 100 times cheaper.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
That Rome simulation had some problems working with Nero.
Have gnu, will travel.
Seems doubtful. These photos, as varied as they are, are at least all pointing at a relatively stationary object. Obviously, not every photo of any human would be in the exact same pose.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It was built with Slave labor. We'll just call it "volunteers" in this case.
Common Sense
I know this sounds ridiculous, but this is the current (insane) state of copyright laws we have. If game companies recreate real cities from tourists' pictures and put them in games, they are violating the copyrights of those tourists. I assume putting pictures on Flickr does not mean assigning copyright to them nor gave blanket permission to 3rd parties to do whatever they want.
If game companies like the current "protection" of the copyright laws, they need to be bound by the same rules.
Oliver.
I'm pretty sure Google Street View already does some of this. Browsing around, it seems to know where the sides of buildings are and let you zoom in on them.
From what I can see they're not blowing their own trumpet as much as these guys, but it can't be far away that Google Earth will have quite comprehensive 3D models of cities (Tokyo is already amazingly complete, although I don't know if that's an automatic system or not).
By the way, Google StreetView has been mentioned, but if you wanted to do an entire city, wouldn't it be simpler to use a bunch of high res shots taken from an helicopter circling around the city?
Also, could it be used by the military? To transform the photographic data from recon planes of an area into something that could be used in some simulation program? Imagine playing Call of Duty in the village you'd have a mission into in a few hours.
You just got troll'd!
I don't think so.
after a while you have a set of "high hit" images (ones that are found the most). start with that set
if you have a location with 5000 images and after 50 of those images you stll don't have a hit for that location: move on to the next location.
it would safe a lot of time.
Privacy is terrorism.
You're completely right: the story here is beginning with disordered data. However, if Hans Rosling did an animated graphic of where all the photos in Rome are taken, it would look more organized than most African countries, and might put some ant hills to shame.
MS licensed this technology, then called "Photo Tourism", from U of Washington in 2006 http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire