Why is this task important? First, nonphotographic depictions
are plentiful and comprise a large portion of our visual record.
We wish to reason about them, and aligning such depictions to
reference imagery is an important
step towards this goal. Second, such technology would open up a
number of exciting computer graphics applications that currently
require expensive manual alignment of 3D models to various forms
of 2D imagery. Examples include interactive visualization of a 3D
site across time and different rendering styles, model-based image enhancement , annotation transfer for augmented reality, inverse procedural 3D modeling, or computational rephotography. Finally, reliable automatic image-to-3D model
matching is important in domains where reference 3D models are
often available, but may contain errors or unexpected changes, such as urban planning,
civil engineering, or archaeology.