Flickr photos used to build Rome in a day

Hey all!

The great work have been done! 3D model of the whole city made from photos!

Rome, they say, wasn't built in a day. But a team of researchers from the University of Washington did build a digital 3D representation of that eternal city in one day, thanks to hundreds of thousands of photos downloaded from Flickr. The team's photo-stitching technology could be used for navigation software, as a virtual set for movies or video games, or as an academic tool to compare cities.
9/28/2009 6:00:00 AM By: Brian Jackson

Researchers who created the technology behind Microsoft’s Photosynth have upgraded their software to reconstruct entire cities in digital 3D by processing photos downloaded from the photo-sharing Web site Flickr.

A team at the University of Washington used 150,000 photos tagged with “Rome” or “Roma” from Flickr to create a 3D model of Rome in 21 hours. It has also reconstructed Venice, Italy from 250,000 images in 65 hours and Dubrovnik, Croatia from 60,000 images in 23 hours. The processing was done using a cluster of 350 computers.

Researchers who created the technology behind Microsoft’s Photosynth have upgraded their software to reconstruct entire cities in digital 3D by processing photos downloaded from the photo-sharing Web site Flickr.

A team at the University of Washington used 150,000 photos tagged with “Rome” or “Roma” from Flickr to create a 3D model of Rome in 21 hours. It has also reconstructed Venice, Italy from 250,000 images in 65 hours and Dubrovnik, Croatia from 60,000 images in 23 hours. The processing was done using a cluster of 350 computers.

Improving on an earlier photo-stitching technology that was designed to create a 3D model of a room or a monument from photographs, the team made the code 100 times faster by refining the way overlapping photos are matched to one another and adding the ability to do processing in parallel on many computers, or remotely via the Internet.

“That work was essentially aimed at landmarks, involving a couple hundred to a thousand images,” says Sameer Agarwal, acting assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. “When you have hundreds of thousands of images available, there’s no way you can think of doing all of those comparatively, even if you had the hardware.”

Microsoft Corp. provided some funding for the University of Washington project. The software giant licenced Photo Tourism in 2006 and used it as a basis for Photosynth, a tool that is now online and freely available. Users can navigate the environments created by others – or download software to create their own 3D environment from a collection of photos.

Photosynth is just over one year old and took 20 months to take from research to a product, says David Gedye, Photosynth Group Program Manager at Microsoft.