Rebuilding Rome in a Day

  • Sameer Agarwal | University of Washington

Entering the search term “Rome” on Flickr.com returns more than two million photos. This collection represents an increasingly complete photographic record of the city, capturing every popular site, facade, interior, fountain, sculpture, painting, cafe, and so forth. It also offers us an unprecedented opportunity to richly capture, explore and study the three dimensional shape of the city.

In this talk, I will presents the first system capable of city-scale reconstruction from images harvested from the web. Our system uses a collection of novel parallel distributed matching and reconstruction algorithms to scale gracefully with both the size of the problem and the amount of available computation.

I will show three dimensional models that are up to two orders of magnitude larger than the next largest results reported in the literature. Furthermore, our system enables reconstruction from data sets of 150,000 images in less than a day.

Speaker Details

Sameer Agarwal is a Postdoc in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He received his Masters in Mathematics and Scientific Computation from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2000 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2006. Since 2006, he has been a part of the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory at University of Washington, working on large scale structure from motion problems. His research interests include optimization, multiview geometry and machine learning.

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