Large-scale, dense city reconstruction from user-contributed photos

The goal of our work is to incrementally reconstruct terrestrial city models from standard digital camera images contributed by multiple users. Hence, the Wiki principle well known from textual knowledge databases is transferred to 3D computer vision. Many state-of-the-art computer vision methods must be applied and modified according to the changing requirements. We describe the utilized 3D vision methods in detail and show results obtained from the current image databases Vienna and Graz acquired by in-house participants. The reconstructions are all maintained in a global database and comprise thousands of photographs. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.