3D Time-lapse Reconstruction from Internet Photos
This work addresses the challenge of generating compelling visual content for applications like virtual tourism or historical visualization, though it is incremental by extending static camera methods.
The paper tackles the problem of creating 3D time-lapse videos from Internet photos of landmarks by enabling camera motion to add parallax effects, resulting in photorealistic sequences over many years.
Given an Internet photo collection of a landmark, we compute a 3D time-lapse video sequence where a virtual camera moves continuously in time and space. While previous work assumed a static camera, the addition of camera motion during the time-lapse creates a very compelling impression of parallax. Achieving this goal, however, requires addressing multiple technical challenges, including solving for time-varying depth maps, regularizing 3D point color profiles over time, and reconstructing high quality, hole-free images at every frame from the projected profiles. Our results show photorealistic time-lapses of skylines and natural scenes over many years, with dramatic parallax effects.