The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

‏There's a big difference between looking at a photograph of a place and being there. But what if you had access to a database of every possible image of that place and could conjure up any view at will? With billions of photographs currently available online, the Internet is beginning to resemble such a database, capturing our world's sites from a huge number of vantage points and viewing conditions. For example, a Google image search for "notre dame" or "grand canyon" each return millions of photos, showing the sites from myriad viewpoints, different times of day and night, and changes in season, weather and decade.This talk explores ways of transforming this massive, unorganized photo collection into 3D scene reconstructions and visualizations of the world's sites, cities, and landscapes. After a brief recap of our work on Photo Tourism and Photosynth, I will focus on current efforts and newest results in the domains of city-scale 3D reconstruction and new visual interfaces for navigating photo collections.