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Telecommunications Microsoft turns photo collections into a 3D virtual reality
Telecommunications Microsoft turns photo collections into a 3D virtual reality | Microsoft turns photo collections into a 3D virtual reality |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Wednesday, 02 August 2006 | |
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At the SISGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston, researchers from Microsoft and the University of Washington demonstrated a new photo-browsing system claimed t "enable people to combine their photos with thousands of others collected on the Internet to present a detailed 3-D model which gives viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle." "As people navigate around the model with their mouse and click on specific photos, the system smoothly transitions between images to create an evocative sense of movement," Microsoft claims. The prototype technology, called Photosynth, can be previewed at http://labs.live.com/photosynth and, according to Microsoft will be available for download later this year. Researchers at the University and at Microsoft Live Labs "combined both new and established techniques in computer vision; image-based modelling and rendering; image browsing, retrieval and annotation; and key-point detection and matching to present unstructured collections of photos in a 3-D perspective." As people navigate around the model with their mouse and click on specific photos, the system smoothly transitions between images to create an evocative sense of movement," according to Microsoft. According to the Photosynth website, the process begins with "nothing more than a bunch of digital photos," that "might be a mixture of images from many different cameras, shooting conditions, dates, times of day, resolutions, and so on." Each photo is processed by computer vision algorithms to extract hundreds of distinctive features, like the corner of a window frame or a doorhandle. Then, photos that share features are linked together in a web. When a feature's found in multiple images, its 3D position can be calculated. When there are many cameras, and many features in common, the algorithms behind Photosynth, it is claimed, "can figure out not only where the features are in 3D, but where all of the cameras would have to have been, and which way they were aimed, consistent with the features they 'saw'. A key component of the system is smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities developed by Seadragon and acquired by Microsoft in February 2006. According to Microsoft this features "The fastest, smoothest image zooming ...[and] can browse collections of many thousands of full resolution images just as smoothly as a single image." Demos, screen shots, the research paper and other information on Photo Tourism can be found on the University of Washington and Microsoft Research Web sites.
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