Reported September 2007

BACKGROUND: Anyone with a digital camera knows it's easy to amass so many photographs, it can be difficult to find one specific photo later on. New software developed by scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle helps you sort your vacation photos in a snap. The software goes well beyond simply organizing a photo collection, according to the UW researchers. It recreates a particular scene or location at the resolution of the photos.

HOW IT WORKS: The UW researchers turned to recent advances in computer vision research to solve the problem. They wrote computer software to analyze each image and calculate where it was taken. To do this, the software looks for small details shared between different photos that can be used to compare them and stitch them together in three dimensions. The photo is then represented by a small triangle placed in the appropriate position in a sketch of the original scene. Even though you are sifting through hundreds or thousands of photos, it feels more like playing a video game. By moving right or left, zooming in and out, the computer will fade to an appropriate shot. Highlighting a feature -- such as the statue of Neptune at the center of Trevi Fountain in Italy -- brings up a high-resolution photo of that object. The current user interface presents each photo as a little box and photos fade into one another to give the impression of a 3D zoom. The next version will create an even more fluid, game-like interface so users feel they truly are navigating in a 3-D world.

The Optical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

If you would like more information, please contact:

Noah Snavely
University of Washington
Seattle, WA
(206) 669-7097
snavely@cs.washington.edu

Optical Society of America
Washington, DC
(202) 223-8130
http://www.osa.org
info@osa.org

DID YOU KNOW?

Companies such as Google and Microsoft recently have begun to create 3-D models of cities by painstakingly gathering photos taken from different angles and then stitching them together.

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