Bringing 3D Models Together: Mining Video Liaisons in Crowdsourced Reconstructions

The recent advances in large-scale scene modeling have enabled the automatic 3D reconstruction of landmark sites from crowdsourced photo collections. Here, we address the challenge of leveraging crowdsourced video collections to identify connecting visual observations that enable the alignment and subsequent aggregation, of disjoint 3D models. We denote these connecting image sequences as video liaisons and develop a data-driven framework for fully unsupervised extraction and exploitation. Towards this end, we represent video contents in terms of a histogram representation of iconic imagery contained within existing 3D models attained from a photo collection. We then use this representation to efficiently identify and prioritize the analysis of individual videos within a large-scale video collection, in an effort to determine camera motion trajectories connecting different landmarks. Results on crowdsourced data illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed approach.