While there are millions upon millions of photos in the public domain and online in general, it would be really cool if there were something useful we could do with them.
A team from Google and the University of Washington has developed a way to autonomously create timelapse videos using public domain photos from websites like Flickr and Picasa.
"We see the world at a fixed temporal scale, in which life advances one second at a time," said the report from the researchers. "Yet these ultra-slow changes are documented by the billions of photos that people take over time. Indeed, an Internet image search for any popular site yields several years worth of photos."
So far, around 11,000 timelapse videos of 3,000 landmarks have been created, with European landmarks being by far the most popular and those in Africa being the least popular because of a lower volume of photos available. Not only that, but the team behind the technology is only just getting started, despite having used 86 million public photos so far.
"The scale and ubiquity of our mined timelapses creates a new paradigm for visualizing global changes," continued the report. "As more photos become available online, mined time-lapses will visualize even longer time periods, showing more drastic changes."
The timelapse videos do not just look good, but they also teach us a lot. For example, the timelapse of a receding glacier highlights the issue of climate change. Timelapses of buildings being created could be useful tools for builders.
Of course, the technology behind the videos is also pretty interesting. Researchers would not be able to simply take photos from online and put them in order because of the fact that photos are taken at different angles, zoom levels, and so on. A number of image manipulation techniques are in use, including the warping, stabilization and color correction of photos. Researchers had to sort through popular viewpoints of landmarks, then warp images on top of each other to create a timelapse.
After images were grouped together, the team had to sort through clusters of photos, which were then whittled down to 1,000 clusters, taking a computer six hours to process.
One of the best parts about the videos is the fact that they are created through crowdsourcing and only require participants to be tourists. If you have been to any of the landmarks in question and have your photos available in the public domain, it's possible that your photo could have been used in the creation of these stunning videos.
