[NetBehaviour] Building Rome In A Day

[Rob Myers]

http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/

"Entering the search term Rome on Flickr returns more than two million
photographs. 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 project, we consider the problem of reconstructing entire
cities from images harvested from the web. Our aim is to build a
parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated
with a city, say Rome, from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches
these images to find common points and uses this information to
compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of
the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.
"

I think that this relates to quantitative methods and data mining for
aesthetics and art. You can see what it misses and the assumptions it
uses, but there is something wonderful in an artistic and
technological way about it.

- Rob.