Software builds Rome in a day

A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington has used hundreds of thousands of tourist photos of Rome to automatically reconstruct the entire city in about a day.

The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the university to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing websites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word ‘Rome’ or ‘Roma’ that were downloaded from the photo-sharing website, Flickr.

Computers analysed each image and in 21 hours combined them to create a 3D digital model. With the model, a viewer can fly around Rome’s landmarks, from the Trevi Fountain to the Pantheon to the inside of the Sistine Chapel.

‘How to match these massive collections of images to each other was a challenge,’ said Sameer Agarwal, a UW acting assistant professor of computer science and engineering. ‘Until now,’ he added, ‘even if we had all the hardware we could get our hands on and then some, a reconstruction using this many photos would take forever.’