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'Live Video Makes Google Earth Cities Bustle' by Vijaysree Venkatraman 
 
"Virtual globes such as Google Earth or Microsoft Visual Earth provide great bird's-eye views of urban landscapes. But those streets are empty, transforming the world's cities into ghost towns.

Now a system that can draw on real-time video from traffic and surveillance cameras, or weather sensors, is set to change that. It populates virtual towns with cars, people and realistic skies.

The video above shows how computer scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta put the idea into practice using video feeds from cameras around the city. Their augmented version of Google Earth incorporates sports scenes, traffic flows, the march of pedestrians and weather.

Surveillance Footage
The system looks out for moving objects in a video feed. Anything moving along a street is classified as a car and replaced with a randomly chosen 3D car model. Moving objects on sidewalks are replaced with human figures, which are animated with stock motion-capture data to make them walk.

Although surveillance cameras are used, no one's privacy is at stake because the models obscure identifying details such as a car's colour and licence plates, says Kihwan Kim, who led the research. "Every moving object is rendered symbolically," says Kim, who worked ..."

Read the complete article: Live Video Makes Google Earth Cities Bustle.