Build Rome in less than a day

The University of Washington creates its own system that builds a city from photographs posted on the Internet (namely, from Flickr). Intermediate results are already good, which is only worth the created 3-dimensional model of the city of Dubrovnik (about 58,000 photos for 5 hours on 352 processors for comparing images and 17.5 hours for creating a model):


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The rest of the work can be viewed here , but I will give a small translation of introductory information about this project:

Rome's entered search query on Flickr returns more than two million photos . This collection more and more makes a complete photographic record of the entire city, filmed all known places, facades, interiors, fountains, sculptures, paintings, cafes, and so on. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity for a rich collection, research and study of 3-dimensional form cities.

In this project, we are considering the problem of reconstruction of these cities from photographs posted on the Internet. Our goal is to create a parallel distributed system that downloads all photos related to the city, for example Rome from Flickr.com. After downloading, she compares this photograph to find common points and uses this information to build the 3-dimensional structure of the city and the place of the photographs themselves in this structure. All this must be done in a day.

This formulates new research for each stage of 3D modeling, from comparing pictures to optimizing work with large scales. The main contribution to our work is a new, parallel distributed comparing system that can compare large collections of photos very quickly, as well as a new node of an ordering program that can solve very large non-linear equations that occur in 3 spatial reconstruction tasks.

Work on this project is still in full swing, and after a few months, we hope to get full scale results on data consisting of 1 million photographs and even more. We show below some of the intermediate results of our running system on the examples of three cities, with photos downloaded from Flickr : Dubrovnik , Croatia; Rome and Venice , Italy.

It is worth noting that this development has good sponsors, among which is Microsoft Research and Google.