With the recent rise in popularity of Internet photo sharing sites like Flickr and Google Images, community photo collections (CPCs) have emerged as a powerful new type of image dataset for computer vision and computer graphics research. With billions of such photos now online, these collections offer huge opportunities in 3D reconstruction, visualization, image-based rendering, recognition, and other research areas. The challenge is that these collections have extreme variability, having been taken by numerous photographers from myriad viewpoints with varying lighting and appearance, and often with significant occlusions and clutter.
Our research seeks to develop robust algorithms that operate successfully on such image sets to solve problems in computer vision and computer graphics.
(Faculty: Curless, Seitz)