Facebook relaunches Events app as Facebook Local, adds bars and food

 Bad news for Yelp and good news for nightlife lovers. When you want to go out, it doesn’t necessarily have to be to an event. So to help you discover bars, restaurants, and nearby attractions too, Facebook is rebranding its standalone Events app as “Facebook Local”. Launching in the U.S. today on iOS and Android, Facebook Local combines events and permanent places to a… Read More

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Pop!_OS Has Arrived: How Does It Compare to Ubuntu?

System76 is one of the most well-known hardware companies in the free and open source software world. That’s not to say the brand is by any means a household name. Nonetheless, System76 has been selling computers that run Ubuntu for over a decade. That’s why the company made news when it announced that it would stop shipping Ubuntu and would instead provide its own Linux-based operating system, Pop!_OS. In the past few weeks, the first official release of Pop!_OS became available for download. Now it’s shipping as an option on new computers from System76. Should you check it out? How...

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How to Hide Files, Folders, and Drives in Windows 10

If you share your computer with others, you may want to hide some files and folders so people don’t go nosing into your files. We’ve talked about password protecting files and folders on Windows. But if that’s overkill for your purposes, you can simply hide your files and folders. We’ve previously covered how to hide files and folders on a Mac. Here are several ways to hide files and folders on Windows. 1. Hide Individual Files/Folders Using the Command Line A simple way to hide a file or folder is to change its attributes using the attrib command on the...

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Parrot’s Henri Seydoux comes to Disrupt to talk about commercial drones

 Henri Seydoux first founded Parrot in 1994. But the company has drastically evolved over time and managed to remain relevant more than 20 years later. Ten years ago, Parrot started working on consumer drones. And now, the company is in the middle of another shift as it now focuses more than ever on commercial drone use cases. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Parrot founder… Read More

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Light Up Your Life With Fun LED Projects for Kids and Adults

Craft projects have come along way since simple yarn, glue, and papier-mâché. But this is all for the good because crafts with LED lights can be decorative, fun, and easier than you think. For both adults and children, these creative ideas with those lights that last will bring a sparkle to your craft table. Colorful Crafts for Adults Many adults enjoy making their own unique decorations and are serious about their craft hobby. For some bright new ideas with LED lights, take a look at these cool creations. 1. Super Easy Centerpieces Whether it’s for your holiday décor, dinner party,...

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Use Amazon Wish and Idea Lists to Get Gifts You Actually Want

Getting gifts you aren’t interested in can be awkward. You want to be grateful to the person who gave you the present, but it’s a pain to return and/or exchange it for something you’ll actually use. If you’d rather guarantee getting something you’ll actually want the first time around, you should take advantage of two of Amazon’s best hidden features: Wish Lists and Idea Lists. Idea Lists allow you to “create collections of interesting items found on Amazon” that you can use yourself or share with others. Wish Lists, on the other hand, are there to help others know what you...

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Find New Travel Destinations With This Nifty Instagram App

Instagrammers and their beautiful travel photos can often be deceptive — and you may not realize until after you’ve bought your plane tickets and made your travel plans. That doesn’t mean you should stop using the visual pull of Instagram photos for your travel inspiration. There are many genuine travel Instagrammers around to stoke your curiosity, those who don’t use Photoshop’s trickery. Instagram has given us a new way to discover new places to travel to. There is also a new way to make this location search and travel planning better. Let’s bring out the little travel guide for your pocket. Use the Sherpa Guide for...

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How to Delete All Your Tweets

We’ve all heard the horror stories. The woman who lost her job because of a Facebook post she made during a party at college a decade ago. The man who was sacked because he accidentally tweeted something that could be easily misinterpreted. The reality is that our social media personas are now an extension of ourselves. Would-be employers trawl through your data to see if there’s anything concerning. Border guards look at your online identity as part of their visa checks. The list goes on. If you regret a few things you said on Twitter in years gone by, it’s...

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Can’t Raise iPhone Ringer Volume? Here’s Why

iOS 11 brought a ton of great features and a ton of frustrations, particularly for those using older phone models. One of the slightly frustrating changes, that luckily has an easy fix, is a change to the the phone’s ringer settings. Prior to the update, you could turn the ringer volume up and down simply by using the volume rocker. After the update, the volume rocker only adjusts the phone’s speaker volume. If that has happened to you and you want to restore the older functionality: Go to Settings > Sounds and toggle Change with Buttons on. That’s it – you’ll once again...

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Youtube Kids implements new policy to flag inappropriate videos targeted at children

 A New York Times piece and a subsequent Medium post this week highlighted an ongoing problem with Youtube Kids — bizarre and disturbing videos aimed at young children using key words and popular children’s characters. Now Youtube says it is putting in place a new process to age-restrict these types of videos in the main Youtube app. “Age-restricted content is automatically… Read More
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Facebook defends revenge porn pilot that has people upload nude images of themselves

 Facebook Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis has clarified some things about how Facebook’s test pilot to combat revenge porn in Australia works. The strategy entails uploading your nude photos or videos to Messenger in order to help Facebook tag it as non-consensual explicit media. Read More
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Twitch is finally releasing the nearly 30 million usernames associated with Justin.tv

 Justin.tv, the life-streaming service that eventually grew into Twitch, was shut down back in 2014. Since then, many Twitch users have asked when the company would release the old Justin.tv usernames – requests that escalated after Twitch introduced the ability to change usernames earlier this year. As it turns out, Twitch is now doing just that. In an email sent confidentially to… Read More
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UberEATS Now Lets You Rate Restaurants

UberEATS users now have the option to rate everything about their experience, and not just the poor delivery driver doing their bidding. In a world where most things come with either a rating out of 5, or a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down (including Netflix) this is long overdue. For the uninitiated, UberEATS is Uber’s food delivery service. You open the UberEATS app, pick a local restaurant, and choose some food. And then some poor sap in a car, on a bike, or even on a skateboard (see below) will whisk your food to your door. And now you can rate your experience....

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Google’s improved image blending means a more seamless Street View

 Google is hard at work behind the scenes improving one of its ambitious technical projects ever – Street View. The company previously revealed that its been rolling out improved camera cars with better photographic equipment to improve the quality and resolution of images that make up its street-level views in Google Maps, but it’s also fixing the sometimes messy stitching that… Read More
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10 of the Best Large Camera Bags for Fashion, Function, and Price

Outside of the camera itself, the most important investment: camera bags. The right bag makes it easy to find all of your lens and accessories while keeping everything protected. It’ll also make carrying your heavy gear around as pleasant as possible. There are so many different bags out there to choose from, and they vary in price from around $15 all the way up to hundreds of dollars. How are you supposed to choose between so many models with such wide variances in price? We’re here to help! Professional Grade: Lowepro, Pelican, and More If you have a high-end camera,...

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You Can Now Try Google’s New Files Go App

Google has released its new Files Go app in beta to anyone who wants to give it a spin. Files Go is a file management app designed to clean up space on your phone and help you stay organized. It also lets you share files with other Android users in a way not dissimilar to Apple’s AirDrop. Earlier this week a new Android app called Files Go appeared on Google Play. However, Google pulled the app when tech sites caught wind of it. Now, Google has made Files Go available once more, and even asked for feedback. So it would...

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Essential Phone can now stream live to Facebook from the 360 camera add-on

 The Essential Phone just got a camera software update that will allow owners of the device to broadcast live, 360-degree video right from the native camera app, provided they have the Essential 360 Camera, too. The update requires no extra software, and live streaming becomes available soon as you snap the 360 camera onto the magnetic accessory port on the back of the Essential Phone. Snapping… Read More

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Essential Phone can now stream live to Facebook from the 360 camera add-on

 The Essential Phone just got a camera software update that will allow owners of the device to broadcast live, 360-degree video right from the native camera app, provided they have the Essential 360 Camera, too. The update requires no extra software, and live streaming becomes available soon as you snap the 360 camera onto the magnetic accessory port on the back of the Essential Phone. Snapping… Read More
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Everything You Need to Know About tbh, the “Positive” Social Network

Facebook has acquired tbh, the anonymous feedback app that only launched in August 2017. Even though tbh is still only in its infancy, it’s become quite popular with teenagers (you only need to be at least 13-years-old to sign up) in middle and high school. It started as being available only in select states, but it is now available nationwide in the U.S. Like any other social networking app, tbh may be popular right now, but who knows how long the trend will last. After all, teenagers seem to prefer Snapchat over all other social networks. Still, it’s the latest...

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Seamless Google Street View Panoramas

Posted by Mike Krainin, Software Engineer and Ce Liu, Research Scientist, Machine Perception

In 2007, we introduced Google Street View, enabling you to explore the world through panoramas of neighborhoods, landmarks, museums and more, right from your browser or mobile device. The creation of these panoramas is a complicated process, involving capturing images from a multi-camera rig called a rosette, and then using image blending techniques to carefully stitch them all together. However, many things can thwart the creation of a "successful" panorama, such as mis-calibration of the rosette camera geometry, timing differences between adjacent cameras, and parallax. And while we attempt to address these issues by using approximate scene geometry to account for parallax and frequent camera re-calibration, visible seams in image overlap regions can still occur.

Left: A Street View car carrying a multi-camera rosette. Center: A close-up of the rosette, which is made up of 15 cameras. Right: A visualization of the spatial coverage of each camera. Overlap between adjacent cameras is shown in darker gray.

Left: The Sydney Opera House with stitching seams along its iconic shells. Right: The same Street View panorama after optical flow seam repair.

In order to provide more seamless Street View images, we’ve developed a new algorithm based on optical flow to help solve these challenges. The idea is to subtly warp each input image such that the image content lines up within regions of overlap. This needs to be done carefully to avoid introducing new types of visual artifacts. The approach must also be robust to varying scene geometry, lighting conditions, calibration quality, and many other conditions. To simplify the task of aligning the images and to satisfy computational requirements, we’ve broken it into two steps.

Optical Flow
The first step is to find corresponding pixel locations for each pair of images that overlap. Using techniques described in our PhotoScan blog post, we compute optical flow from one image to the other. This provides a smooth and dense correspondence field. We then downsample the correspondences for computational efficiency. We also discard correspondences where there isn’t enough visual structure to be confident in the results of optical flow.

The boundaries of a pair of constituent images from the rosette camera rig that need to be stitched together.

An illustration of optical flow within the pair’s overlap region.

Extracted correspondences in the pair of images. For each colored dot in the overlap region of the left image, there is an equivalently-colored dot in the overlap region of the right image, indicating how the optical flow algorithm has aligned the point. These pairs of corresponding points are used as input to the global optimization stage. Notice that the overlap covers only a small portion of each image.

Global Optimization
The second step is to warp the rosette’s images to simultaneously align all of the corresponding points from overlap regions (as seen in the figure above). When stitched into a panorama, the set of warped images will then properly align. This is challenging because the overlap regions cover only a small fraction of each image, resulting in an under-constrained problem. To generate visually pleasing results across the whole image, we formulate the warping as a spline-based flow field with spatial regularization. The spline parameters are solved for in a non-linear optimization using Google’s open source Ceres Solver.

A visualization of the final warping process. Left: A section of the panorama covering 180 degrees horizontally. Notice that the overall effect of warping is intentionally quite subtle. Right: A close-up, highlighting how warping repairs the seams.

Our approach has many similarities to previously published work by Shum & Szeliski on “deghosting” panoramas. Key differences include that our approach estimates dense, smooth correspondences (rather than patch-wise, independent correspondences), and we solve a nonlinear optimization for the final warping. The result is a more well-behaved warping that is less likely to introduce new visual artifacts than the kernel-based approach.

Left: A close-up of the un-repaired panorama. Middle: Result of kernel-based interpolation. This fixes discontinuities but at the expense of strong wobbling artifacts due to the small image overlap and limited footprint of kernels. Right: Result of our global optimization.

This is important because our algorithm needs to be robust to the enormous diversity in content in Street View’s billions of panoramas. You can see how effective the algorithm is in the following examples:

Tower Bridge, London

Christ the Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro

An SUV on the streets of Seattle

This new algorithm was recently added to the Street View stitching pipeline. It is now being used to restitch existing panoramas on an ongoing basis. Keep an eye out for improved Street View near you!

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Bryan Klingner for helping to integrate this feature with the Street View infrastructure.