Building Rome in a Day from Flickr Images

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have designed a system capable of reconstructed 3D models of cities from images available on Flickr.  By aligning all of the images & performing some 3D registrations, they can extract 3D points.

In their project ‘Building Rome in a Day’ the group 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. All this to be done in a day.

Look after the break to see a 3D Flythrough of Dubrovnik (Shown above) built using their software.  Full details of the system are available on their site.

via Digital Urban: Building Rome in a Day: A 3D City via Flickr.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.