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Topic Name: Researchers create 3D models of world landmarks
Category: Computer Graphics
Research persons: Michael Goesele, Steve Seitz, Noah Snavely, Brian Curless, Hugues Hoppe
Location: University of Washington, United States
Details
More than 10 million members of the photo-sharing Web
site Flickr snap pictures of their
surroundings and then post those photos on the Internet. One group at the University
of Washington is doing the reverse--downloading thousands of photos from
Flickr and using them to recreate the original scenes.
A presentation in October at the International
Conference on Computer Vision showed how photos from online sites such as
Flickr can be used to create a virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of
Liberty in New York City.
"The big breakthrough here is being able to compute very accurate 3D
models from people's vacation photos," said co-author Steve Seitz, a UW
associate professor of computer science and engineering. "The long-term
vision is to be able to reconstruct the detailed geometry of all the structures
on the surface of the Earth. Many people are working toward that goal, but by
using online collections this work brings in a whole new source of imagery and
level of detail."
Online photo-sharing Web sites such as Flickr and Google are popular because
they offer a free, easy way to share photos. Flickr now holds more than 1
billion photos; a search for "Notre Dame Paris" finds more than 80,000
files. The study authors, experts in computer vision, believe this is the
world's most diverse, and largely untapped, source of digital imagery.
But the freely available photos do present a challenge: these are holiday
snapshots and personal photos, not laboratory-quality research images. While
some may be postcard-perfect representations of a setting, others may be dark,
blurry or have people covering up most of the scene.
To make the 3D digital model, the researchers first download photos of a
landmark. For instance, they might download the roughly 60,000 pictures on
Flickr that are tagged with the words "Statue of Liberty." The
computer finds photos that it will be able to use in the reconstruction and
discards pictures that are of low quality or have obstructions. Photo Tourism, a
tool developed at the UW, then calculates where each person was standing when he
or she took the photo. By comparing two photos of the same object that were
taken from slightly different perspectives, the software applies principles of
computer vision to figure out the distance to each point.
"The general principle is very similar to how our eyes work," said
lead author Michael Goesele, a former postdoctoral researcher at the UW who is
now a professor at Technische Universität
Darmstadt in Germany. "You get multiple views from different points of
a scene, and then you find the same point in different views and infer from that
the depth of the object."
In tests, a computer took less than two hours to make a 3D reconstruction of
St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, using 151 photos taken by 50 different
photographers. A reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral used 206 images taken by
92 people. All the calculations and image sorting were performed automatically.
"We don't quite get the accuracy of a laser scanner, but we're in the
ballpark," Seitz said. The recreations of Notre Dame show individual
figures carved into the stone facade. A model of The Duomo in Pisa, Italy, a
building about 160 feet tall, is accurate to within a few inches. The resolution
of the 3D model mostly depends on the resolution of the original photos.
Creating 3D reconstructions of individual buildings is a first step in a
long-term effort to recreate an entire city using online photographs.
"We've downloaded about 1 million photographs of Rome from Flickr,"
Seitz said. "We want to see how much of the city we can
reconstruct--including exteriors, interiors and artifacts." The group hopes
to make significant progress on the Rome project over the next couple of years,
he said.
Other co-authors on the recent paper were Noah Snavely, a UW doctoral student
in computer science and engineering; Brian Curless, a UW associate professor of
computer science and engineering; and Hugues Hoppe, a researcher at Microsoft
Research in Redmond, Wash. The research was funded through grants from the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Microsoft
Research and Adobe Systems Inc.
About Researchers:
Steven Seitz
Associate Professor
Short-Dooley Career Development Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Box 352350
Seattle, Washington 98195-2350
Office: CSE 592 (directions), in the Allen Center
Phone: (206) 616-9431
Fax: (206) 543-2969
Email: seitz@cs.washington.edu
Assistant: Jennifer Maione (206) 616-3726 , CSE 456
Michael Goesele
Address:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Goesele
GRIS
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Fraunhoferstr. 5
64283 Darmstadt
Germany
phone: +49 6151 155 664
fax: +49 6151 155 669
email: firstname.lastname@gris.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
Office Location :
Room 311 in Fraunhofer IGD building (directions)
About Funds:
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (in German Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) is a foundation of the German government for the promotion of international cooperation in the field of scientific research.
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health. With an annual budget of about $5.91 billion (fiscal year 2007), NSF funds approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing.
The NSF's director, its deputy director, and the 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB)[1] are appointed by the President of the United States, and confirmed by the United States Senate. The director and deputy director are responsible for administration, planning, budgeting and day-to-day operations of the foundation, while the NSB meets six times a year to establish its overall policies. The current NSF director is Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr., and the current deputy director is Dr. Kathie L. Olsen.
Microsoft Research
Microsoft Research (MSR) is a division of Microsoft created in 1991 for researching various computer science topics and issues. It is one of the top research centers worldwide,[citation needed] currently employing Turing Award winners, C.A.R. Hoare, Butler Lampson, Fields Medal winner Michael Freedman, MacArthur Fellow Jim Blinn, Dijkstra Prize winner Leslie Lamport and many other highly recognized experts in computer science, physics, and mathematics, including Jim Gray up until his highly publicized disappearance while sailing at sea.
Adobe Systems
Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA.
Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. The company name Adobe comes from Adobe Creek, which ran behind the house of one of the company's
founders. Adobe acquired its former competitor, Macromedia, in December 2005.
As of January 2007, Adobe Systems has 6,068 employees, about 40% of whom work in San Jose. Adobe also has major development operations in Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; Ottawa, Canada, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Newton, Massachusetts; San Luis Obispo, California and in Hamburg, Germany, Noida, India, and Bangalore, India.
Since 2001, Fortune magazine has ranked Adobe as an outstanding place to work. Adobe was rated the fifth-best U.S. company to work for in 2003, sixth in 2004, and 31st in
2007.
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