Millions of people around the world are snapping photographs of the same things — the same mountains, statues, waterfalls and buildings — and then uploading those photographs online. Now a group of researchers from Google and the University of Washington are working together to assemble and “mine” those photographs for information about how locations change over time.
The team clusters publicly-available images by landmarks, sorts them by date, and then “warps” the photograph so they all appear to be taken from the same viewpoint. As the Post’s Abby Ohlheiser writes, researchers were able to find more than 20,000 time-lapse sequences from 86 million photos. You can see more of the images in Ohlheiser’s article.
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