Scene Reconstruction and Visualization from Internet Photo Collections: A Survey

Abstract

The Internet has become an unprecedented source of visual information about our world, with millions of people uploading photos and videos to media-sharing sites at staggering rates. Virtually all of the world's famous landmarks and cities (and many not-so-famous ones) have been photographed hundreds of thousands or millions of times, and billions of these photos can be found on photo-sharing websites. This richness and variety make such Internet photo collections extremely attractive as a source of data for applications ranging from mapping and visualization to social science. However, a prerequisite to many such applications is recovering structure — often in the form of 3D geometry — from these massive, unorganized collections of imagery. This ever-growing collection of visual data opens up fundamental new questions in computer vision and computer graphics, where traditional techniques designed for small, controlled sets of images cannot be readily applied. This article surveys recent work on applying geometric computer vision to large, unstructured photo collections, as well as applications enabled by these new techniques in scene visualization, location recognition, image editing, and other areas of computer vision and graphics.