Welcome!

AMOS, the Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes, captures images from publicly accessible, outdoor webcams across the United States and around the world. We are exploring how to use these images for understanding changes in natural environments, building tools to detect phenology events, atmospheric visibility, and the use public spaces.

To support these applications, we work on fundamental research in camera geo-location, calibration, and registration to GIS data, and automatic annotation of events and objects in the scenes. The large image archive also supports large scale statistical approaches to understand the changing appearance of natural scenes based on long-term, outdoor timelapse imagery.

AMOS was started in March of 2006 and now contains 180 million images and counting. The AMOS project is based at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Kentucky, and led by Robert Pless and Nathan Jacobs.

We encourage you to learn more about the AMOS dataset, participants, and publications. Options for browsing the dataset, mapping the webcam locations, or submitting your own webcam are available through links on the right.

Acknowledgements

This project gratefully acknowledges a wide variety of funding sources, including initial funded through NSF (RI-IIS 0546383), "CAREER: Passive Vision, What Can Be Learned by a Stationary Observer". Current work on the project is supported through:

  • NSF (CGV-1111398), "Analyzing Images Through Time",
  • NSF (EF-1065734), "Continental-scale Monitoring, Modeling and Forecasting of Phenological Responses to Climate Change", and
  • DARPA grant (D11AP00255) "ContextualEyes: A Context-Aware Surveillance System", (to Nathan Jacobs).
In the past, work has been supported by
  • Washington University I-CARES program, "Re-Purposing the Global Webcam Network as an Atmospheric/ Environmental Observation. Sensor"
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, Washington University, or DARPA.

This project also gratefully acknowledges AWS Convergence Technologies Inc. for allowing us to archive a collection of images from the weatherbug camera network.