Photo Tourism
The collaborative research team from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research (Noah Snavely, Rahul Garg, Steven M. Seitz & Richard Szeliski) who only two years ago in 2006 published their paper “Photo Tourism” and their technology demonstration “Photosynth” have again pushed the boundaries of what can be achieved by intuitively processing the abundance of digital images shared on the web. This week at SIGGRAPH 2008 they’re sharing with the world some even better technology they’ve been working on which they call “Finding Paths through the World’s Photos“. It looks waaay more exciting than it sounds, and again it’s the beginning of something even better (but you’ve got to stay tuned for that).
When a scene is photographed many times by different people, the viewpoints often cluster along certain paths. These paths are largely specific to the scene being photographed, and traverse interesting regions and viewpoints. The research team seeks to discover a range of such paths and turn them into controls for image-based rendering. Their approach takes as input a large set of community or personal photos, reconstructs camera viewpoints, and automatically computes orbits, panoramas, canonical views, and optimal paths between views. The scene can then be interactively browsed in 3D using these controls or with five degree-of-freedom free-viewpoint control. As the user browses the scene, nearby views are continuously selected and transformed, using control-adaptive reprojection techniques.
Check out the video:
Full details at the project site.
Kudos: Long Zhen | Crossthebreeze
August 18th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
[…] Agrawala, Brian Curless, Michael Cohen, Sing Bing Kang and Noah Snavely -yes, the same Noah from the Photo Tourism thingy I talked about last week) sent out another super duper program update which was heard over the […]