Indian Builds Rome In A Day!

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oi-Staff

By Staff

Wednesday, September 16, 2009, 15:23

They said: Rome can't be built in a day. But now an Indian origin researcher has everyone proved as he virtually builds, the whole ancient city of Rome in a matter of hours, with his ingenious computer algorithm.

The new program can digitise hundreds of pictures of the city, including the Colosseum and St. Peter's Basilica, in just a matter of hours. It uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.

Developed by Sameer Agarwal of the University of Washington built a fully digital Rome using 1,50,000 tourist photos, tagged with the word "Rome" or "Roma" that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.

Computers analysed each image, combined them in 21 hours, and created a 3-D digital model. "How to match these massive collections of images to each other was a challenge," said Sameer Agarwal, a UW acting assistant professor of computer science and engineering, and lead author of a paper being presented in October at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Kyoto, Japan.

He said: "(Until now) even if we had all the hardware we could get our hands on and then some, a reconstruction using this many photos would take forever."

In addition to Rome, the researchers have recreated the Croatian coastal city of Dubrovnik, processing 60,000 images in less than 23 hours using a cluster of 350 computers, and Venice, Italy, processing 250,000 images in 65 hours using a cluster of 500 computers.

The novel technique can create online maps that offer viewers a virtual-reality experience.

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