Building Rome on a Cloudless Day

Marc Pollefeys

Frahm et al: Reconstruction From Photo Collection Fig. 6

To enable you to explore the cities of the world from your home, UNC and ETH researchers have created a technique to use millions of images to automatically create 3D models of landmarks and geographical locations that could be embedded, for example, into applications such as Google Earth or Bing Maps. Jan-Michael Frahm, research assistant professor of computer science, and his team of researchers from UNC-Chapel Hill and ETH-Zurich use the millions of images available for each major city on earth through Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr to automatically create the needed 3D models of landmarks and locations.

The method is the first to deal with the true scale of Internet photo collections. The system used the three million images available for Rome to reconstruct all major landmarks of the city within one day on a single PC. Researchers also reconstructed the landmarks of Berlin in the same manner. This is an improvement of more than a factor of one thousand over commercial systems available today, like Microsoft PhotoSynth, and alternative techniques published in the research literature. This efficiency is essential if one is to fully utilize the billions of user-provided images continuously being uploaded to the Internet.

The advantage of using Internet photo collections, rather than video of a landmark, to create the 3D models is that the photo collections show the landmark at different times, under different lighting and weather conditions. The variety of photos can be used to create a richer experience for the user viewing the 3D model. If available, the technology can utilize video as well. The technology could also be a building block for disaster response software. For example, an aircraft could be sent to take video of the aftermath of a hurricane, and the resulting 3D model could be used to assess damage from a remote location, saving time and money.

Jan-Michael Frahm collaborated with Marc Pollefeys, professor of computer science at ETH-Zurich and adjunct professor at UNC, and Svetlana Lazebnik, assistant professor of computer science at UNC, on this project. A paper with the title "Building Rome on a Cloudless Day" presenting the research was recently presented at the 11th European Conference on Computer Vision.

More details can be found at:
cs.unc.edu/~jmf/publications/Frahm_et_al_ReconstructionFromPhotoCollection.pdf
www.cs.unc.edu/~jmf/rome_on_a_cloudless_day
www.ics.forth.gr/eccv2010/intro.php