Photo tourism is a system for browsing large collections of photographs in 3D. Our approach takes as input large collections of images from either personal photo collections or Internet photo sharing sites (a), and automatically computes each photo's viewpoint and a sparse 3D model of the scene (b). Our photo explorer interface enables the viewer to interactively move about the 3D space by seamlessly transitioning between photographs, based on user control (c).


News

Visit our PhotoCity project where you can help us reconstruct your neck of the woods.

We have also scaled up the vision algorithms behind Photo Tourism to work on entire cities. See the Rome in a Day project page for more details.

See our work on Finding Paths through the World's Photos.

Our structure from motion code is also now available at the Bundler homepage.

Videos

• Short Video - 1 min [wmv 11 MB] [mov 23 MB]
• Long Video - 5.5 min [wmv 55 MB] [mov 120 MB]

Papers

• Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski, "Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D," ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Proceedings), 25(3), 2006, 835-846. [pdf] [bibtex]


• For more details on the structure from motion algorithm, please see:
  Noah Snavely, Steven M. Seitz, Richard Szeliski, "Modeling the world from Internet photo collections," International Journal of Computer Vision (to be published). [pdf] [bibtex]
  


• For information about how to extract focal length data from EXIF tags, please visit this page.


• For information on other related projects, please visit the UW Community Photo Collections project page.

Presentation

• Full Presentation - [zip 164 MB]
• Presentation without videos - [ppt 35 MB]

Code (New!)

• Structure from motion code - Our structure from motion code is now available here.

Data (New!)

• Images and Reconstructions - We are making several Internet image collections (and associated reconstructions) available here.


• Patch Database - Simon Winder and Matt Brown have used our data to create a database of corresponding local image patches, available here.

Team

• Noah Snavely - CSE Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL) , University of Washington
• Steve Seitz - CSE Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL) , University of Washington
• Richard Szeliski - Interactive Visual Media Group , Microsoft Research
• Kevin Chiu - CSE Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL) , University of Washington
• Andy Hou - CSE Graphics and Imaging Lab (GRAIL) , University of Washington

Press

• See what people are saying about Photo Tourism in the press.

Links

• More on Internet photo collections can be found at the UW GRAIL lab Community Photo Collections project page.
• Visit PhotoCity, and help us reconstruct the world in 3D.
• Check out the technology preview of Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs. Photosynth is based on this research.
• The Microsoft Research Photo Tourism Page.

Acknowledgments

• This work was supported by Microsoft Research, the University of Washington Animation Research Labs, an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) fellowship, National Science Foundation grants IIS-0413198 and DGE-0203031, and an endowment by Emer Dooley and Rob Short.
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• We also thank the many Flickr users who agreed to let us use their images for this project.