Scene Reconstruction and Visualization From Community Photo Collections Recent progress is described in digitizing and visualizing the world from data captured by people taking photos and uploading them to the web.
Noah Snavely, Ian Simon, Michael Goesele, Member Ieee, Richard Szeliski, Steven M. Seitz · 2010
There are billions of photographs on the Internet, representing an extremely large, rich, and nearly comprehensive visual record of virtually every famous place on Earth. Unfortu- nately, these massive community photo collections are almost completely unstructured, making it very difficult to use them for applicationssuchasthevirtualexplorationofourworld.Overthe past several years, advances in computer vision have made it possible to automatically reconstruct 3-D geometryVincluding camera positions and scene modelsVfrom these large, diverse photo collections. Once the geometry is known, we can recover higher level information from the spatial distribution of photos, such as the most common viewpoints and paths through the scene. This paper reviews recent progress on these challenging computer vision problems, and describes how we can use the recovered structure to turn community photo collections into immersive, interactive 3-D experiences.