Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D

We present a system for interactively browsing and exploring a large unstructured collection of photographs of a scene using a novel 3D interface. Our system consists of an image-based modeling front end, which automatically computes the viewpoint of each photograph as well as a sparse 3D model of the scene and image to model correspondences. Our photo navigation tool uses imagebased rendering techniques to smoothly transition between photographs, while also enabling full 3D navigation and exploration of the set of images and world geometry, along with auxiliary information such as overhead maps. Our system also makes it easy to construct photo tours of scenic or historic locations, as well as to annotate image details, which are automatically transferred to other relevant images in the collection. We demonstrate our system on several large personal photo collections as well as images gathered from photo sharing Web sites on the Internet.