
A new landmark in computer vision - Anon84
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-landmark-in-computer-vision.html
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wallflower
"Our landmark recognition engine, in fact, can provide input data to these 3D
reconstruction systems and enables them to be scalable to a large number of
landmarks."

This might be revolutionary, as being one of the first automated systems to
aggregate visual data into intelligent sets, making it scalable from local to
global.

[http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/google_landmark_recog...](http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/google_landmark_recognition.pdf)

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nwatson
How does this compare technically with Microsoft's Photosynth project?
<http://photosynth.net/> ... looks like they're already doing what Google
proposes to do.

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mlinsey
Photosynth aggregates images already known to be of a particular scene and
figures out how they fit together. This paper is about taking an image from an
unknown place and identifying whether it is of a particular landmark.

Both probably make heavy use of unsupervised clustering techniques on images
but are otherwise totally different use cases, if nothing else.

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caffeine
"Google: we brute-force stuff."

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njoubert
The fact that this is basically true makes it all the funnier!

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redorb
I was super impressed in the street view - navigation updates where the circle
changes on depth, and goes sideways on buildings. Really how long until they
can upgrade the lasers to work good enough to scan a building front (barcode
style).. 5 years? Until then this a great hack-ish way of doing it

