Photo tourism: exploring photo collections in 3d

Figure 1: Our system takes unstructured collections of photographs such as those from online image searches (a) and reconstructs 3D points and viewpoints (b) to enable novel ways of browsing the photos (c). We present a system for interactively browsing and exploring large unstructured collections of photographs of a scene using a novel 3D interface. Our system consists of an image-based modeling front end that automatically computes the viewpoint of each photo-graph as well as a sparse 3D model of the scene and image to model correspondences. Our photo explorer uses image-based rendering techniques to smoothly transition between photographs, while also enabling full 3D navigation and exploration of the set of images and world geometry, along with auxiliary information such as overhead maps. Our system also makes it easy to construct photo tours of scenic or historic locations, and to annotate image details, which are automatically transferred to other relevant images. We demon-strate our system on several large personal photo collections as well as images gathered from Internet photo sharing sites