Community Photo Collections

With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google Images, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset for computer vision and computer graphics research.  With billions of such photos now online, these collections should enable huge opportunities in 3D reconstruction, visualization, image-based rendering, recognition, and other research areas.  The challenge is that these collections have extreme variability, having been taken by numerous photographers from myriad viewpoints with varying lighting and appearance, and often with significant occlusions and clutter.  Our research seeks to develop robust algorithms that operate successfully on such image sets to solve problems in computer vision and computer graphics.

Team

• Brian Curless - University of Washington
• Michael Goesele - University of Washington, TU Darmstadt
• Hugues Hoppe - Microsoft Research
• Steven M. Seitz - University of Washington
• Ian Simon - University of Washington
• Noah Snavely - University of Washington
• Rick Szeliski - Microsoft Research

Overview Talk

The Google Tech Talk "Navigating the World's Photographs" by Steve Seitz, Noah Snavely, and Michael Goesele gives a good overview over our current work on community photo collections. View a video of the talk on Google Video or download the video in Flash Video (FLV) format (114 MB) or AVI format (141 MB).

Projects and Publications

The following projects are based on community photo collections:

	Photo Tourism Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski. Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D (PDF) ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Proceedings), 25(3), 2006, 835-846. More information is available at the project page.
	Multi-View Stereo for Community Photo Collections Multi-View Stereo for Community Photo Collections (PDF) Michael Goesele, Noah Snavely, Brian Curless, Hugues Hoppe, Steven M. Seitz Proceedings of ICCV 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, October 14-20, 2007 More information is available at the project page.
	Scene Summarization for Online Image Collections Scene Summarization for Online Image Collections (PDF) Ian Simon, Noah Snavely, and Steven M. Seitz. Proceedings of ICCV 2007, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, October 14-20, 2007. More information is available at the project page.