Rick Szeliski's dashboard

Rick Szeliski replied on November 09, 2008 01:10 to the question "Can the Synth be GeoTagged?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Great news! The Virtual Earth (Live Maps) team has now linked geo-tagged Photosynths to Live Search Maps.

To read all about it, see Chris Pendelton's blog or just search for a location and then Explore Collections.

I've attached a snapshot of some Photosynths you get if you search for "Paris" in Live Maps and turn on the Explore Collections feature. Be sure to click on the "Show Items with Photosynths" icon, i.e., the rightmost button in
.

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Rick Szeliski set one of Rick Szeliski's replies as an official response to "geo tagging, live maps" in Microsoft Live Labs

Rick Szeliski replied on November 09, 2008 01:01 to the idea "geo tagging, live maps" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Great news! The Virtual Earth (Live Maps) team has now linked geo-tagged Photosynths to Live Search Maps.

To read all about it, see Chris Pendelton's blog or just search for a location and then Explore Collections.

I've attached a snapshot of some Photosynths you get if you search for "Paris" in Live Maps and turn on the Explore Collections feature. Be sure to click on the "Show Items with Photosynths" icon, i.e., the rightmost button in
.

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Rick Szeliski replied on October 23, 2008 00:31 to the update "New feature: Favorites." in Microsoft Live Labs:

Where can I find my list of favorites?

I looked under Explore, and I couldn't find my own favorites list. It only shows everyone's favorites.

Oh...never mind...

I just went to "Rick's synths", where I keep my own synths, and found the link there. I' worried that other people might have the same confusion, which is why I'm posting this follow-on message.

Rick Szeliski replied on October 20, 2008 23:59 to the question "Photosynth wont synth multiple sets of panoramic photos?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

If you would still like help with this problem, please post the URLs of your problem synths on this thread.

Rick Szeliski replied on October 20, 2008 23:53 to the question "Synths focusing too much on clouds" in Microsoft Live Labs:

I'm afraid the the computer vision technology inside Photosynth isn't "intelligent" enough to distinguish between non-rigid structures like moving clouds (which shouldn't get matched) and rigid structures like the ground.

I would suggest either shooting your images with less sky showing, or editing your images and painting out the sky (a big blur brush or blue brush should probably do the trick).

A comment on the idea "Recreate a 3D scene by High Definition video camcorder" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Indeed, the idea of having a robot map out its environment to better perform its tasks (including obstractle avoidance) is a classic problem in robotics that goes under the name of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping).

While traditionally, such systems were often build with sonar or laser scanners, newer variants use video cameras computer vision techniques closely related to Photosynth.

You can find out more about such techniques by searching for "Visual SLAM" on the Web. – Rick Szeliski, on September 23, 2008 05:46

Rick Szeliski replied on September 04, 2008 23:08 to the question "Point Cloud Export" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Please see the existing discussion on Pointcloud exporter.

Rick Szeliski replied on September 03, 2008 06:40 to the idea "Getting real 3d" in Microsoft Live Labs:

If you type the words "3D" or "3-d" in the topics box, you will see a list of related discussions.

The most recent post by Nathanael on this thread has a nice set of pointers to the best of these.

Rick Szeliski replied on September 03, 2008 06:28 to the idea "Recreate a 3D scene by High Definition video camcorder" in Microsoft Live Labs:

There's already a discussion around this idea under the title "Create synth from HD camera footage"

Rick Szeliski replied on August 28, 2008 17:01 to the question "Hollow Objects?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yes, I've done this with the interior and exterior of our potting shed.,
http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=d...

Be sure to take *lots* of highly overlapping photos (at least 75%) to get the best results.

Rick Szeliski replied on August 22, 2008 17:26 to the problem "white specks in adjacent images" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Please have a look at Help link in the lower right-hand corner of any synth Web page, then click on the Photography Guide link. The last page of the PDF has a list of keyboard shortcuts.

Team: shouldn't we make this shortcut link more discoverable, e.g., by adding a separate link on the About page and having an HTML page?

Rick Szeliski replied on August 22, 2008 16:51 to the problem "white specks in adjacent images" in Microsoft Live Labs:

These are the 3D points that are reconstructed by the Photosynth algorithm. You can hit 'p' to toggle these on and off.

Rick Szeliski replied on August 22, 2008 14:21 to the discussion "Create synth from HD camera footage" in Microsoft Live Labs:

This sounds like a great set of ideas, and I encourage you to try some of them out and let everyone know how it goes.

There's actually already a related question/discussion going on under the topic of "Why not just take a video?"

Here at Live Labs, we've experimented a bit with creating Video synths. To fully automate the process, it's useful to have at least two elements: figure out when video frames overlap by about the right amount (say 75%) and select frames that are less blurry.

Our work is still in the research phase, but if it pans out, we'll add it to the list of potential future Photosynth features.

P.S.: Drew Steedly wrote a nice research article on how to automaticallly stitch panoramas from video. You can find it by searching for "Steedly Efficiently registering video" on the Web.

Rick Szeliski replied on August 22, 2008 14:19 to the problem "2D synthing works bad" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Another potential problem is that the images elements (keyboard keys) are very repetitive, so the pattern matching algorithm underlying Photosynth has a hard time differentiating between them. (It doesn't actually read text :-)

I'm not sure if this will help, but you could try using even more overlap and smaller zoom changes.

Then again, since photosynth has these wonderful zoom capabilities, why not just stick with the 2nd row synth?

Rick Szeliski replied on August 21, 2008 19:28 to the question "Can the Synth be GeoTagged?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Yes! After you finish creating your synth, go back and view the synth, and be sure to add some fun or informative description (and more tags, if you want).

There's a globe button on that page (below and to the left of your description) that lets you geo-tag your synth using an interactive map from Virtual Earth (maps.live.com).

Unfortunately, I think that the current system ignores any geo-tags already in the images (JPEG EXIFs).

P.S.: There's a cool post from Chris Pendelton this morning showing how to create a Virtual Earth collection with all of your photosynths at http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualearth/ar....

Rick Szeliski replied on August 21, 2008 19:24 to the question "How many Photos would it take for small household items" in Microsoft Live Labs:

According to the "Photography Guide", which you can get to by clicking on the "Help" link in the lower right-hand corner of any Photosynth web page, it's recommended that you shoot your photos approximately every 15 degrees, so it takes about 24 photos to get a full 360.

That's just if you want to orbit the object in one loop. If you want to see the object from above and below, you should shoot more photos.

[ For you math geeks out there, how many photos does it take to cover a sphere if they are spaced 15 degrees apart? ]

Rick Szeliski replied on August 21, 2008 14:28 to the question "Photos gone, only points?" in Microsoft Live Labs:

Good question, I'm sure that others will come across this.

There are a number of keyboard shortcuts in the system, which are documented on the last page of the "Photography Guide", which you can get to by clicking on the "Help" link in the lower right-hand corner of any Photosynth web page.

There may be another location for this information, but that's what I found.

The direct answer your question is that the 'p' key switches between displaying points, images, or both.