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Snapmania's Broken Tourist Remover  (View post)

Nathan [PersonRank 0]

Sunday, July 23, 2006
17 years ago4,530 views

Perhaps the system is under too much load, having just been mentioned on Boing Boing. It's a great idea.

Pauline Evanosky [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Maybe getting rid of tourists is harder than we thought.

Matt Cutts [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

I've always wanted to so something like this. Best to worst would give you a base picture, then you align the shots (any kind of minimization of RMS error in the images), and finally you take the mode pixel colors, on the theory that the most likely "real" color of the pixel is the most common, and tourists are just passing blips.

Steve Mann did some similar compositing he called a lookpainting:
http://n1nlf-1.eecg.toronto.edu/orbits/lookpainting.html
http://n1nlf-1.eecg.toronto.edu/orbits/orbits.html

Personally, I think a series of pictures from a webcam would be a really interesting dataset to play with. If only there were more hours in a day..

orli yakuel [PersonRank 8]

17 years ago #

funny, I was just wrote about them yesterday :)
http://go2web2.blogspot.com/2006/07/snapmania-ultimate-online-photo.html

honestly, I didn't try the tourist remover, (what's up with that name anyway..) but
I can ay that SNAPMANIA have so much more to offer!

alek [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Matt – "Personally, I think a series of pictures from a webcam would be a really interesting dataset to play with."

Philipp mentioned my site before, but I've got a couple of hundred thousand archived images of .... uhhhhh ... http://www.watching-grass-grow.com/ (self-explanatory URL) if you want an incredibly exciting (interesting?) dataset to play with ... ;-)

Pauline – "Maybe getting rid of tourists is harder than we thought."
Mod that comment up +5 funny!

Matt Cutts [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Nice, alek. :)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

They got back to me. Nice support. They're trying to figure out the problem with the pics, and they explained some mails aren't send out due to high load...

I tried the same manually with the 8 layers of this set
http://blogoscoped.com/files/tourists9.zip
... aligning the pics and erasing the tourists, thus leaving only the background of each pic shine thru. But the results weren't good.

raincoaster [PersonRank 0]

17 years ago #

Anything which removes tourists is a gift from god. Can we make it refresh every five seconds? Kinda like the Sprinkler of Death or something...

alek [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

alek – "I've got a couple of hundred thousand archived images"

Continueing off-topic a bit and replying to myself, but this thread motivated me to go count 'em all (don't ask me why I'm keeping 'em around). For 2006, total number of images is a bit over 2,300,000 – maybe I can send all ~100 GBytes to Snapmania and get a real nice composite picture of my grass! ;-)

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

So, they told me it doesn't really work with pics like mine where there's too many tourists :)

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

You can get rid of tourists by putting the camera on a solid tripod and taking a five-minute exposure using a very tiny apeture (or a very dark filter). This kind of thing is often done for commercial photography of public places.

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