

Time-Lapse Mining from Internet Photos - doh
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/timelapse/

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miahi
This is an interesting counter-argument to the question "why bother taking
photos of the well-known place X, there are already thousands of (better)
pictures of it?"

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osxrand
That's really interesting that the Wall Street bull moves over the years. I
wonder if this is due to people leaning against it, or something like
cleaning, or some other reason.

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breck
That one is in the "failure cases" segment

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zachberger
The blurring is the failure case, not the movement of the statue

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tschuy
Very interesting project. They show a few "failure cases" at the end of the
video; I'd be interested to see a few more of those. The ones they showed
really didn't look all that bad.

I wonder what the copyright on such a timelapse would look like?

~~~
eCa
Some of the photos they used are CC licensed, so it would probably be CC-BY-
SA.

~~~
tschuy
My problem would the images that are copyrighted, unless they specifically
pulled only CC images, which would limit photo numbers by quite a bit.

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deepnet
This is great work that seems immediately useful to areas like conservation
and art.

The images were heavily homoginised which was good for continuity but perhaps
obscures details.

Using the timelapses as a scrubbable index to the original images would be a
cool tool.

~~~
miahi
The images probably needed this homogenization because they don't match 100%,
being taken from slightly different places and angles (so you not only get
different framing but also parallax issues).

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hardmath123
This reminds me of [https://vimeo.com/63653873](https://vimeo.com/63653873),
where they used Google Maps Street View to make hyperlapses.

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neves
The video displays a world map with the locations where they found enough
photos to make time lapses. Does anyone has a link to this map? It would be
great to discover the best time of the year to visit some places, like Salto
Angel, the waterfall in Venezuela, or Lençóis, in Maranhão State - Brazil.

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nitrogen
Imagine combining this with Photosynth or whatever the project was that could
stitch random photos into a 3D scene.

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apu
A lot of the underlying machinery is similar: they both rely on "structure
from motion" (sfm) techniques to automatically estimate both camera locations
and 3d geometry of the scene simultaneously. And both works come from the same
lab: the GRAIL group at the University of Washington.

(I postdoced in that lab for 3 years and the authors of this paper are
friends/former colleagues.)

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nitrogen
Cool. SFM is a really fascinating concept to me. How much of that work is
commercially available to consumers?

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apu
More than people realize... Google and apple, for example, use sfm heavily to
compute their 3d maps (in Google earth and the apple equivalent). Google also
uses it in various other products.

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tgb
Very very cool, but I was expecting to see a time lapse of a mining operation
and it's effects. Still want to see that!

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justifier
have you seen manufactured landscapes?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufactured_Landscapes)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8cpCL8FSFM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8cpCL8FSFM)

beautiful film, there is one scene where the camera is tight on a 2 meter
diameter tire dump truck and then slowly pans out until the dump truck is only
the size of a pixel revealing a mining operation that fills the whole scene

~~~
tgb
Thanks for the suggestion!

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stared
With all such results there is one question: are they releasing code?
Otherwise... it's a nice demo to watch, but impossible to use (and even: hard
to increment on it).

~~~
iXce
Well that'd be research code anyway :) You'd probably better off rebuilding
from scratch based on the research paper. The software shouldn't be that
complicated in the end, the main challenge (to me) is gathering that 86M
images dataset.

~~~
stared
Research code is infinitely better than no code. Research papers are almost
never complete enough to reimplement it (seriously - I met a lot of
academicians doing it, and most of the time it was not possible without
contacting authors; just - text does not compile).

Vide:

[http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23237/why-are-
pa...](http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/23237/why-are-papers-
without-code-but-with-results-accepted)

[http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37370/should-
i-s...](http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/37370/should-i-share-my-
horrible-software)

(A similar things holds for data as well.)

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monk_e_boy
In retrospect this is a very obvious idea. Brilliantly done!

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jbhatab
Very impressive technology. This is just the beginning of leveraging the
massive amounts of data out there in innovative new ways.

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dghughes
I thought (inspired by Person of Interest TV show and photo supersaturation)
after the Boston bombing it would be a good project to use publicly available
photos, video, security camera video to track or search for suspects.

Or it could be used to search for a kid such as during an Amber Alert.

But I have no skills to do this :(

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nevster
There's a lot of news and 'new' stuff on the internet. And then occasionally
you see something like this which is truly a fresh idea. I feel inspired when
that happens!

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Aardwolf
This is amazing! Would love to see more, and longer, timelapses!

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amadeusw
This shows how the natural world around us is slowly, but always changing. It
never occurred to me that waterfalls changed like this!

