Keith Noah Snavely
Photo Tourism: Visualizing the world from Internet photo collections

Wednesday, April 29th , 2009
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee at 10:30 AM)

The Internet is an unprecedented source of visual information about our world, with billions of images on photo sharing websites such as Flickr. These images include thousands of photos of virtually every famous world site. For instance, a Flickr search for "Grand Canyon" returns over half a million photos, taken by thousands of different people, from myriad viewpoints, at all times of day, and during every season of the year. While this photo collection contains a nearly complete description of the appearance of the Grand Canyon, it is also very unorganized, making it difficult to get a sense of the rich scene structure underlying the photos.

In this talk, I will show how we can use 3D computer vision algorithms to automatically recover structure from Internet photo collections, and will demonstrate new photo navigation interfaces, such as Microsoft's Photosynth, that enable powerful new ways to explore our world. The ultimate goal of this work is to create a rich 3D model of all of the world's sites and cities.

Noah Snavely is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Originally from Tucson, Arizona, he received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona in 2003. He then worked with Steven M. Seitz and Richard Szeliski at the University of Washington, receiving his Ph.D. in 2008. Noah is interested in computer vision and computer graphics, especially in using vast amounts of imagery from the Internet for reconstructing and visualizing the world and is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, Cornell University.

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Helen-Nicole Kostis