This is an interesting counter-argument to the question "why bother taking photos of the well-known place X, there are already thousands of (better) pictures of it?"
That's really interesting that the Wall Street bull moves over the years. I wonder if this is due to people leaning against it, or something like cleaning, or some other reason.
Very interesting project. They show a few "failure cases" at the end of the video; I'd be interested to see a few more of those. The ones they showed really didn't look all that bad.
I wonder what the copyright on such a timelapse would look like?
I was thinking the exact same thing - the failure cases are possibly more interesting than the 'successful' ones. The Wan Chai skyline particularly seemed to pulse between day and night in a very interesting manner.
The images probably needed this homogenization because they don't match 100%, being taken from slightly different places and angles (so you not only get different framing but also parallax issues).
The video displays a world map with the locations where they found enough photos to make time lapses. Does anyone has a link to this map? It would be great to discover the best time of the year to visit some places, like Salto Angel, the waterfall in Venezuela, or Lençóis, in Maranhão State - Brazil.
A lot of the underlying machinery is similar: they both rely on "structure from motion" (sfm) techniques to automatically estimate both camera locations and 3d geometry of the scene simultaneously. And both works come from the same lab: the GRAIL group at the University of Washington.
(I postdoced in that lab for 3 years and the authors of this paper are friends/former colleagues.)
More than people realize... Google and apple, for example, use sfm heavily to compute their 3d maps (in Google earth and the apple equivalent). Google also uses it in various other products.
Was thinking that back than when Microsoft could have acquired Yahoo, that this would eventually lead to a quite comprehensive 4-dimensional point cloud of everything ever photographed.
beautiful film, there is one scene where the camera is tight on a 2 meter diameter tire dump truck and then slowly pans out until the dump truck is only the size of a pixel revealing a mining operation that fills the whole scene
With all such results there is one question: are they releasing code? Otherwise... it's a nice demo to watch, but impossible to use (and even: hard to increment on it).
Well that'd be research code anyway :)
You'd probably better off rebuilding from scratch based on the research paper.
The software shouldn't be that complicated in the end, the main challenge (to me) is gathering that 86M images dataset.
Research code is infinitely better than no code. Research papers are almost never complete enough to reimplement it (seriously - I met a lot of academicians doing it, and most of the time it was not possible without contacting authors; just - text does not compile).
I thought (inspired by Person of Interest TV show and photo supersaturation) after the Boston bombing it would be a good project to use publicly available photos, video, security camera video to track or search for suspects.
Or it could be used to search for a kid such as during an Amber Alert.
There's a lot of news and 'new' stuff on the internet. And then occasionally you see something like this which is truly a fresh idea. I feel inspired when that happens!
