Modeling People and Places with Internet Photo Collections

CowboyRobot writes: "Two resarchers have created a system that aggregates thousands of photos from around the Web and integrates them into single images.
One application is creating maps by taking the GPS coordinates of photos taken from a collection. Another is creating 3D models of historical buildings by automatically pasting together tourists' photos taken from different angles.
"The challenge is that online data sets are largely unstructured and thus require sophisticated algorithms that can organize and extract meaning from noisy data. In our case, this involves developing automated techniques that can find patterns across millions of images.""