Space-Time Tradeoffs in Photo Sequencing

Abstract

Photo-sequencing is the problem of recovering the temporal order of a set of still images of a dynamic event, taken asynchronously by a set of uncalibrated cameras. Solving this problem is a first, crucial step for analyzing (or visualizing) the dynamic content of the scene captured by a large number of freely moving spectators. We propose a geometric based solution, followed by rank aggregation to the photo-sequencing problem. Our algorithm trades spatial certainty for temporal certainty. Whereas the previous solution proposed by [4] relies on two images taken from the same static camera to eliminate uncertainty in space, we drop the static-camera assumption and replace it with temporal information available from images taken from the same (moving) camera. Our method thus overcomes the limitation of the static-camera assumption, and scales much better with the duration of the event and the spread of cameras in space. We present successful results on challenging real data sets and large scale synthetic data (250 images).