Login
Computer Science @ Rochester
Monday, September 19, 2011
11:00 AM
Computer Studies Bldg. 209
Noah Snavely
Cornell University
Reconstructing the World from Internet Photo Collections
We live in a world where visual data is becoming ubiquitous, but increasingly difficult to manage. The Internet, in particular, is becoming an unprecedented source of visual information about our world, with billions of images on photo sharing and social networking sites like Flickr and Facebook, and millions more added every hour. For instance, we can easily find millions of photos of cities: a Flickr search for "Rome" returns over two million photos, for "NYC" over five million, and for "London" over eight million. In this talk, I will describe new computer vision techniques we have developed for taking large, unstructured image collections such as these, and automatically reconstructing city-scale 3D models of the underlying scenes. I will also talk about recent work on PhotoCity, an online game for filling in the gaps in these models using human players to capture missing data.

Bio: Noah Snavely is on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where he has been an assistant professor since 2009. He received a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Arizona in 2003, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2008. Noah works in computer graphics and computer vision, with a particular interest in using vast amounts of imagery from the Internet to reconstruct and visualize our world in 3D, and in creating new tools for enabling people to capture and share their environments. His thesis work was the basis for Microsoft's Photosynth, a tool for building 3D visualizations from photo collections that has been used by many thousands of people. Noah is a recipient of a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship (2011) and was named as one of Technology Review's TR35 Innovators under 35 (2011).

Refreshments will be provided at 10:45AM