Understanding the world from the sea of online photos
DAVID CRANDALL, SCHOOL OF INFORMATICS AND COMPUTING, INDIANA UNIVERSITY
NOAH SNAVELY, DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Computational photography often considers sets of photos taken by a single user in a single setting, but the popularity of online social media sites has created a social aspect to photo collections as well. Photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook contain vast amounts of latent information about our world and human behavior. Our recent work has involved building automatic algorithms that analyze large collections of imagery in order to understand and model people and places at a global scale. Geotagged photographs can be used to identify the most photographed places on Earth, as well as to infer the names and visual representations of these places. At a local scale, we can build detailed three-dimensional models of a scene by combining information from thousands of two-dimensional photographs taken by different people and from different vantage points. One key representation for many of these tasks is a network: a graph linking photos by visual similarity or other measures.
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2212756
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Carrie Gates, Senior Vice President and Director of Research, CA Labs
Christopher W. Clifton, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Purdue University