Synthesizing Illumination Mosaics From Internet Photo-Collections

Dinghuang Ji, Enrique Dunn, Jan-Michael Frahm; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015, pp. 3988-3996

We propose a framework for the automatic creation of time-lapse mosaics of a given scene. We achieve this by leveraging the illumination variations captured in Internet photo-collections. In order to depict and characterize the illumination spectrum of a scene, our method relies on building discrete representations of the image appearance space through connectivity graphs defined over a pairwise image distance function. The smooth appearance transitions are found as the shortest path in the similarity graph among images, and robust image alignment is achieved by leveraging scene semantics, multi-view geometry, and image warping techniques. The attained results present an insightful and compact visualization of the scene illuminations captured in crowd-sourced imagery.