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Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos
- monk_e_boy 11y agoIn retrospect this is a very obvious idea. Brilliantly done!
- nitrogen 11y agoImagine combining this with Photosynth or whatever the project was that could stitch random photos into a 3D scene.
- mxfh 11y agoWas 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.
- apu 11y agoA 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.)
- nitrogen 11y agoCool. SFM is a really fascinating concept to me. How much of that work is commercially available to consumers?
- apu 11y agoMore 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.
- tschuy 11y agoVery 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?
- eCa 11y agoSome of the photos they used are CC licensed, so it would probably be CC-BY-SA.
- tschuy 11y agoMy problem would the images that are copyrighted, unless they specifically pulled only CC images, which would limit photo numbers by quite a bit.
- deathcakes 11y agoI 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.
- deepnet 11y agoThis is great work that seems immediately useful to areas like conservation and art. The images were heavily homoginised which was good for continuity but perhaps obscures details. Using the timelapses as a scrubbable index to the original images would be a cool tool.
- miahi 11y agoThe 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).
- miahi 11y agoThis 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?"
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tgb 11y agoVery very cool, but I was expecting to see a time lapse of a mining operation and it's effects. Still want to see that!
- justifier 11y agohave you seen manufactured landscapes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8cpCL8FSFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8cpCL8FSFM 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
- tgb 11y agoThanks for the suggestion!
- DINKDINK 11y agoA more specific title might be: "Internet Crowd-sourced Timelapse Integrator"
- stared 11y agoWith 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).
- iXce 11y agoWell 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.
- stared 11y agoResearch 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). Vide: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23237/why-are-papers-without-code-but-with-results-accepted http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23237/why-are-pa... http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37370/should-i-share-my-horrible-software http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37370/should-i-s... (A similar things holds for data as well.)
- roryokane 11y ago> Upcoming > Code and more results will be published soon.
- Aardwolf 11y agoThis is amazing! Would love to see more, and longer, timelapses!
- hardmath123 11y agoThis reminds me of https://vimeo.com/63653873 https://vimeo.com/63653873, where they used Google Maps Street View to make hyperlapses.
- amadeusw 11y agoThis shows how the natural world around us is slowly, but always changing. It never occurred to me that waterfalls changed like this!
- osxrand 11y agoThat'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.
- KLVTZ 11y agoWas about to ask the same question. I was thinking the ground shifted over the years or something.
- buro9 11y agoThe bull actually appears to move, to have rotated. Look at the floor of that segment and you'll notice a cobble stone being revealed over time that was definitely covered in the earlier photos.
- breck 11y agoThat one is in the "failure cases" segment
- zachberger 11y agoThe blurring is the failure case, not the movement of the statue
- neves 11y agoThe 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.
- dghughes 11y agoI 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. But I have no skills to do this :(
- jbhatab 11y agoVery impressive technology. This is just the beginning of leveraging the massive amounts of data out there in innovative new ways.
- nevster 11y agoThere'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!