Someone's done the hard work of finding, sorting, and stitching together millions of photos from the Internet to create animated portraits of the evolution of places.
James Vincent reports on a new project from researchers at Google and the University of Washington that animates places around the world by crowd sourcing publicly available images. Vincent explains:
"Researchers from Google and the University of Washington have found a way though, creating a powerful set of algorithms that automatically sorts millions of online photos into time-lapses of everything from skyscrapers to glaciers. The internet is plugged in at one end, and a record of our changing world comes out the other." They call it 'time-lapse mining.'"
The work allowed the team to create thousands of time-lapses of the most popular places on Earth—everything ranging from the Las Vegas Strip to the Briksdalsbreen Glacier in Norway, which you can see in the video below.
A paper documenting the work and more info is available at the project website.
FULL STORY: Public photos mined to create beautiful time-lapses
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