Faculty: Frank Dellaert
Students: Grant Schindler, Kevin Quennesson

This project, funded by the National Science Foundation and Microsoft Research, addresses the growing need for novel ways to access the exponentially growing archives of historical imagery. It is imperative to go beyond cataloging, indexing, and keyword driven databases, to a paradigm where the computer at least partially understands the content of images.

Pushing the state of the art in scene understanding and 3D modeling will enable radical new ways to view and experience historical and/or temporally varying imagery. This research builds time-varying 3D models that can serve to pull together large collections of images pertaining to the appearance, evolution, and events surrounding one place or artifact over time, as exemplified by the 4D Cities project: the completely automatic construction of a 4D database showing the evolution over time of a single city.

During the course of inquiry one of the most interesting findings was how much people flock to the tops of certain buildings to take pictures.

More information about the 4D Cities Research project can be found here.