Abstract: Photo collections are easily accessible on the Internet today,including a wide range of outdoor scenes.For each scene,the collections contain a large amount of samples with different viewpoints and illumination conditions.Exploiting the rich information in this new type of data source for the purpose of constructing realistic virtual scenes is a challenging problem in computer graphics,computer vision and virtual reality.This paper reviews recent research progresses regarding image-based geometry modeling,illumination modeling and reflectance modeling techniques applicable to Internet photo collections,and attempts to suggest some future research directions in this domain.