Crowdsourcing Based 3d Modeling

Web-based photo albums that support organizing and viewing the users’ images are widely used. These services provide a convenient solution for storing, editing and sharing images. In many cases, the users attach geotags to the images in order to enable using them e.g. in location based applications on social networks. Our paper discusses a procedure that collects open access images from a site frequently visited by tourists. Geotagged pictures showing the image of a sight or tourist attraction are selected and processed in photogrammetric processing software that produces the 3D model of the captured object. For the particular investigation we selected three attractions in Budapest. To assess the geometrical accuracy, we used laser scanner and DSLR as well as smart phone photography to derive reference values to enable verifying the spatial model obtained from the web-album images. The investigation shows how detailed and accurate models could be derived applying photogrammetric processing software, simply by using images of the community, without visiting the site.