Published September 18th, 2009 by Future Atlas
Crowdsourced Intelligence from Photos
Researchers are creating digitized versions of cities from thousands of photos that people have shared online, Physorg.com reports.
The program used 150,000 photos of Rome to create a 3-D digital rendering of the city, for instance.
This capability is another step toward truly open-source intelligence: publicly available images and other information will be able to generate increasingly detailed snapshots of places, people, and particular moments. And the ability to analyze this information will steadily democratize, and grow more powerful: Google is experimenting with facial recognition software that could reveal the locations and activities of millions of people who aren’t even the primary subject of a given photo, as just one example.
This idea has historic antecedents, by the way. During WW II, the OSS collected American’s tourist photos of Europe, cataloged them and made them partially machine-accessible, and used them to plan bombing raids. (Nicholson Baker, “Deadline,” New Yorker, July 24, 2000, 47.)
(Tip from @Changeist)
(Image: Creative Commons from gruntzooki, Flickr)