Time-lapse video of shared photos

Many places and objects are photographed by different people at different times. It can be architectural objects, monuments, reserves, various natural objects. The same Eiffel Tower is photographed dozens of times every second. A team of researchers from Google and the University of Washington decided to test the possibility of compiling Time-lapse videos from similar photos that are in the public domain.

Developers searched for photos on services such as Flickr, Picasa and some other sites. Naturally, a large number of images were discovered, which were mentioned above. But many of them had a different perspective, different lighting, colors. Therefore, the team had to look for a way to unify the images found using correction in a graphical editor. And this method was developed, its results are impressive.

The videos that result from these photos are not only amazing, but also colorful. For example, in the sequel, one of the received videos is posted, which shows the dynamics of the glacier. A variety of people photographed this glacier at different times. The same can be said about the skyscraper under construction.


It seems that in Europe the densest “coverage” of the territory with pictures (Google).

Some sequences were made up of more than 1000 photos, and the processing took up to 6 hours. The most interesting thing about all this is that the authors of the photos seem to make a substantial contribution to the process of developing the technology for converting the sequence of images into video, but for this nobody (except the authors of the project, of course) needs to do anything - just stay as tourists.