Modeling People and Places With Internet Photo Collections

CowboyRobot writes "Two researchers have created a system that aggregates thousands of photos from around the Web and integrates them into single images. One application is creating maps by taking the GPS coordinates of photos taken from a collection. Another is creating 3D models of historical buildings by automatically pasting together tourists' photos taken from different angles. 'The challenge is that online data sets are largely unstructured and thus require sophisticated algorithms that can organize and extract meaning from noisy data. In our case, this involves developing automated techniques that can find patterns across millions of images.'"

Comments

Re:creating 3D models of historical buildings

[evandrofisico]

I guess it is the photosynth project. Apparently it became one silverlight demo only.

Re:creating 3D models of historical buildings

[b4dc0d3r]

Noah Snavely is credited in both places, and this article cites "continuing research" into an "emerging field". The 2008 "Photo Tourism" project was turned into PhotoSynth, but the other stuff seems new.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/phototours/

12 year series of papers at siggraph

[peter303]

Highlights:
The first paper I recall was constructing a 3D model of the Berkeley campus from individual snapshots.
Google Street View uses a variant of this technology.
MicroSoft and NASA joined forces after the Columbia accident to generate a view of the Space Shuttle from hundreds of closeup pictures taken from the space station.
I saw a paper by architects constructing the entire interior of an office building from a large series of snapshots. Its considered more accurate for building engineers than the architectural drawings.

Re:creating 3D models of historical buildings

[Trepidity]

He's also released a good portion of the underlying algorithms (though not the actual tools) in the open-source bundler library, which is quite helpful in terms of having a base to build other applications on, or to do research in this area.