Researchers Turn Online Pics Into Time-Lapse Videos

There are gazillions of photos stored on the Internet, most of which are collecting dust in image libraries and social networks.

Three researchers, however, found a purpose for them. University of Washington grad student Ricardo Martin-Brualla and professor Steven Seitz, as well as Google software engineer David Gallup created time-lapse videos out of photos scavenged from the Web.

“We see the world at a fixed temporal scale, in which life advances one second at a time,” the research said(Opens in a new window). “Instead, suppose that you could observe an entire year in a few seconds—a 10 million-times speed-up.”

At that scale, you could watch cities expand, glaciers shrink, seasons change, and children grow.

But most people don’t have the camera equipment or the patience to shoot their own time-lapse videos outside of the comfort of an Apple iPhone or Instagram.

So Martin-Brualla, Seitz, and Gallup introduced an approach for synthesizing time-lapse videos of popular landmarks from large community photo collections.

“This capability is transformative,” their research paper read. “Whereas before it took months or years to create one … time-lapse, we can now almost instantly create thousands of time-lapses covering the most popular places on earth.”

The challenge, the team said, is finding the interesting ones, often buried in a pile of the world’s public photos—a technique they call time-lapse mining.

Via Google’s photo-sharing services Picasa and Panoramio, the trio compiled 86 million time-stamped and geo-tagged images from around the world, then ordered them chronologically and made necessary edits to compensate for viewpoint differences.

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The result: 10,728 time-lapses that show a changing world.

Not every attempt proves successful, though. The team observed “a number of interesting failure modes,” thanks to inaccurate time-stamps, changing geometry, and equipment missteps.

And, unlike regular time-lapse videos shot with a stable camera over a period of time, day and night photos run through the algorithms resulted in what the researchers called an “unrealistic ‘twilight’ effect.”

“The scale and ubiquity of our mined time-lapses creates a new paradigm for visualizing global changes,” the paper said. “As more photos become available online, mined time-lapses will visualize even longer time periods, showing more drastic changes.”