Graph Construction and Interactive Visualization for Virtual Tours Based on Redundant Panoramic Image Collections

Abstract Recent developments in consumer-grade panoramic cameras led to new possibilities in creating virtual tours, e.g., through museums or real estate. Most current approaches for the creation of these tours are based on manual generation of navigable links between the images. We consider cases where large numbers of georeferenced images are taken by multiple users and introduce an approach for automatically generating a graph structure that links the images in a reasonable network while sorting out redundant data. Our approach does not expect a trajectory of temporally related points but merely an incoherent point cloud, e.g., from crowdsourcing of many different contributors. We expand our methodology by a visualization approach offering in-image navigation, realized through interactive links pointing towards neighbored images. Our method delivers a virtual tour with adjustable density on and apart from road networks. We compared the output of our algorithm to human-made virtual tour graphs and were able to verify a high similarity, which approves the hypothesis that automatically generated virtual tours can be intuitive for users.