3D Time-lapse Reconstruction from Internet Photos

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to create photorealistic 3D time-lapse videos from internet photos, incorporating camera motion and parallax effects to visualize landmarks over years.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to generate 3D time-lapse sequences with camera motion from unordered internet photo collections, addressing depth, color regularization, and high-quality reconstruction.

Findings

Photorealistic 3D time-lapses with parallax effects

Effective handling of time-varying depth maps

High-quality, hole-free image reconstruction

Abstract

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.