Wednesday 5 August 2009

Building Rome In A Day urban modelling research project

A great research project for anybody into novel methods to do urban modelling; the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory of the University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering have considered the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. The aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city from Flickr.com.

After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. The movie above details their sample work using 58,000 images of Dubrovnik sourced from Flickr.

The results are stunning (and I love the slight NPR tinge!). Check the project out (called Building Rome In A Day) at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/

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