Chicago (IL) – Scientists from the University of Washington and the TU Darmstadt, Germany, believe that vacation pictures posted on sites such as Flickr could become the foundation for a new effort that aims to create a realistic 3D model of Rom, Italy.
"The big breakthrough here is being able to compute very accurate 3D models from people's vacation photos," said Steve Seitz, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and co-author of a paper presented at the International Conference on Computer Vision. "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," noted.
Seitz as well as Michael Goesele, a professor at TU Darmstadt, said that their research groups have begun downloading millions of pictures from Flickr to recreate buildings and scenes. The resources appear to be virtually bottomless – more than 10 million members of Flickr have posted more than 1 billion pictures so far. The scientists said that a search for “Statue of Liberty” brings up 60,000 hits and “Notre Dame Paris” yields more than 80,000 hits, providing imagery from almost any angle of the cathedral. In first tests, 3D models of Notre Dame, the Statue of Liberty, the Duomo in Pisa, Italy, and St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome were created.
Software takes over the selection of images: For example the St. Peter’s Basilica model required 151 photos and the Notre Dame model used 206 images.
"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, according to Seitz.
The scientists said that they have begun re-creating the city of Rome as a 3D model. "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.