Researchers at the University of Washington and Google have created impressive time-lapse videos of popular tourist sites by “mining” pre-existing photographs taken from the Internet. Examples of the technique are shown in a video released by Ricardo Martin Brualla who worked on the project with David Gallup and Steven Seitz.
The team first collected 86 million photos from the Internet and grouped them by location and vantage point. Photos of the same landmarks taken from similar angles were then sorted by when they were taken and processed to smooth out any differences in lighting. A computer model generated by the photos corrected slight differences in angle to give the best possible result. The team outlined their process in a paper and have said they will release the code they used with more results soon.
images via Prosthetic Knowledge