Calibrated, Registered Images of an Extended Urban Area

We describe a dataset of several thousand calibrated, geo-referenced, high dynamic range color images, acquired under uncontrolled, variable illumination in an outdoor region spanning hundreds of meters. All image, feature, calibration, and geo-referencing data are available at http://city.lcs.mit.edu/data. Calibrated imagery is of fundamental interest in a wide variety of applications. We have made this data available in the belief that researchers in computer graphics, computer vision, photogrammetry and digital cartography will find it useful in several ways: as a test set for their own algorithms; as a calibrated image set for applications such as image-based rendering, metric 3D reconstruction, and appearance recovery; and as controlled imagery for integration into existing GIS systems and applications. The Web-based interface to the data provides interactive viewing of high-dynamic-range images and mosaics; extracted edge and point features; intrinsic and extrinsic calibration, along with maps of the ground context in which the images were acquired; the spatial adjacency relationships among images; the epipolar geometry relating adjacent images; compass and absolute scale overlays; and quantitative consistency measures for the calibration data.

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