The availability of such rich imagery of large parts of the earth’s surface under many different viewing conditions presents enormous opportunities, both in computer vision research and for practical applications. From the standpoint of shape modeling research, Internet imagery presents the ultimate data set, which should enable modeling a significant portion of the world’s surface geometry at high resolution. As the largest, most diverse set of images ever assembled, Internet imagery provides deep insights into the space of natural images and a rich source of statistics and priors for modeling scene appearance. Furthermore, Internet imagery provides an ideal test bed for developing robust and general computer vision algorithms that can work effectively “in.
