Photo-Guide: Image-Based City Exploration

The core idea of the project is the enhancement of current state-of-the art navigation systems by visual information obtained from geo-referenced photographs. The aim is to establish a suite of tools together with algorithmic foundations that will be essential for any large scale image-based guidance project.

The main hypothesis of this project is that in the case of guidance, especially for pedestrians, the first-person perspective is intuitive and leads to natural orientation. In the project we will research how to generate first-person views on top of databases of simple ground-based photographs and classical overview maps. The ultimate idea is a system which allows the user to navigate through a city and even through interiors of buildings guided by the aid of annotated first-person views. Furthermore, the actual creation of the routes shall happen automatically on demand.

Examples of fields that can benefit from the proposed approach are tourism and general entertainment industries, city planners, local governments, simulation and security training, emergency management, civil protection and disaster control, as well as driving simulation to name but a few. Ultimately, the following scientific fields can profit from the proposed basic research results: computer graphics with image processing, computer vision, computational photography, pattern recognition, photogrammetry and remote sensing, cartography, computer aided design, geo-sciences and mobile-technology.