Photosynth - Use your camera to stitch the world

[Jakub Gliklich]

Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them. I am amazed by the idea. What do you think?

[paolo marenco]

Great jacub thks

[Jakub Gliklich]

I've found something like this:

In 2005, Noah Snavely, a computer-science graduate student at the University of Washington, and associate professor Steven Seitz began a collaboration with Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski to create a more intuitive way to view photos in relation to one another.

"Computer vision has been very recently getting to the point where it's working really well," Seitz said. "At the same time, there's been an explosion of photos on the Internet. Photo sharing had begun to blossom. We wanted to see if you could reconstruct 3-D models from people's pictures on the Internet."

The result was "Photo Tourism," a part of the genesis of Photosynth that uses "vision algorithms" to identify key common attributes, such as a doorknob or a statue, and link related images together.

By maintaining the connection between images and comparing the size and angle of the images, the Photo Tourism technology can determine from what angle the picture was taken.

Finally, the images are projected into a 3-D environment at the correct distance and angle to accurately reconstruct popular tourist attractions such as the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Impressed with Photo Tourism's capabilities, Microsoft Live Labs took up the project in 2006.

Enter the Seadragon

Earlier that year, Microsoft had acquired another image-rendering technology, Seadragon.

Founded in 2003 by Aguera y Arcas, Seadragon Software was part of a technological movement to radically change the way high-resolution images could be viewed and stored.

Rather than completely rendering every image in view the way most image display software now does, Seadragon uses a render-as-you-go strategy, meaning a picture will only become clearer as the user zooms in on it specifically. This technique completely eliminates any limits put on the computer's processing power by the size or quality of the image. Theoretically, Seadragon's ability to store information in the form of images is boundless.

"It's really cool, really exciting," said Frédo Durand, an associate computer-science professor at MIT. "It's the culmination of evolution and revolution."

A Marriage of Technologies

The two separate technologies, Photo Tourism and Seadragon, were then combined at Microsoft Live Labs in 2006 to create Photosynth.

Link to the article

[paolo marenco]

Fantastic Jacub, maybe was a start up aquired by Microsoft of just born inside the company?