Photo tourism

TLDR

The system enables interactive browsing and exploration of large unstructured photo collections of a scene via a novel 3D interface. It builds an image‑based model that computes each photo’s viewpoint and a sparse 3D scene, then uses image‑based rendering to allow smooth transitions, full 3D navigation, and easy creation of photo tours with transferable annotations. The system was demonstrated on multiple large personal photo collections and images from internet photo‑sharing sites.

Abstract

We present a system for interactively browsing and exploring large unstructured collections of photographs of a scene using a novel 3D interface. Our system consists of an image-based modeling front end that automatically computes the viewpoint of each photograph as well as a sparse 3D model of the scene and image to model correspondences. Our photo explorer uses image-based rendering techniques to smoothly transition between photographs, while also enabling full 3D navigation and exploration of the set of images and world geometry, along with auxiliary information such as overhead maps. Our system also makes it easy to construct photo tours of scenic or historic locations, and to annotate image details, which are automatically transferred to other relevant images. We demonstrate our system on several large personal photo collections as well as images gathered from Internet photo sharing sites.