The ancient city of Rome was not built in a day. It took nearly a decade to build the Colosseum, and almost a century to construct St. Peter’s Basilica. But now the city, including these landmarks, can be digitized in just a matter of hours.
A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.
The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the UW to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word “Rome” or “Roma” that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.
Earlier versions of the UW photo-stitching technology are known as Photo Tourism. That technology was licensed in 2006 to Microsoft, which now offers it as a free tool called Photosynth.
“With Photosynth and Photo Tourism, we basically reconstruct individual landmarks. Here we’re trying to reconstruct entire cities,” said co-author Noah Snavely, who developed Photo Tourism as his UW doctoral work and is now an assistant professor at Cornell University.
Source: Science Daily
+ Access and Use Photosynth (via Microsoft)
+ Various Photosynth’s of Rome
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