Using Lasers And Range Finders To Digitize Objects

esoteric0 writes: "Those boys at Stanford are at it again: They created some new algorithms for 'combining multiple range and color images, allow us to reliably and accurately digitize the external shape and surface characteristics of many physical objects.' " It's not just a mouthful -- they've created a cool digitized version of buildings, maps, and Michelangelo's David. Ever wonder what his toe looks like when digitized at .05mm?

Comments

Flashback...

[Paradigm Lost]

Whoa! Did anyone else have a sudden flashback to Tron? I can almost see Michelangelos David in one of those glowing blue outfits.

If we only could...

[The Grammar Jew]

digitize certain young actres...and then release the data under an open source license...the possibilities are, shall I say, endless...

Greetings Program

[Cylix]

Yes! Finally I can get digitized and take on
Master Control myself! But really, this technology
has been around since 1977. Disney brings
us one of those excellent "historical documents"
refered to as Tron. There we see digitizing
people has been around for a lot longer then
some stafford punks would like us to believe.

Anyhow, I am off to suit up and get ready for
a cycle race or two and hopefully I can slam
my disc right through the MC. Remember, the
users have all the power!

Pragma: nocache & don't email it

[h2odragon]

From the "more images" page:

"The images of Michelangelo's statues that appear on this web page are the property of the Digital Michelangelo Project and the Soprintendenza ai beni artistici e storici per le province di Firenze, Pistoia, e Prato. They may not be copied, downloaded and stored, forwarded, or reproduced in any form, including electronic forms such as email or the web, by any persons, regardless of purpose, without express written permission from the project director Marc Levoy. Any commerical use also requires written permission from the Soprintendenza. "

Hmph. Let's email the picutes to HIM. :)

Re:Pragma: nocache & don't email it

[The Grammar Jew]

Yes, they own the right to those electronic reproductions of Michelangelo sculptures because they produced those creproductions. It did cost them time and money. Please don't expect they'll share these reproductions with you.

If you want your own reproduction, go and make one. Michelangelo's copyright, if any, has expired. No one is hoarding David. It's here, open for everyone to copy.

OTOH Harry Potter's hasn't, so you can't OCR his books. Sorry.

Ars Technica has a feature

[Segfault 11]

Ars Technica has a feature on this subject entitled: `Michelangelo Goes Digital'

Re:Ars Technica has a feature

[tcomeau]

And NPR did a wonderful interview with Marc Levoy last month, available on their web site as David's Eyes which includes things that the laser scan missed, and the news that all of the art history books are wrong.

tc>

Applications in Space Exploration

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe this process would be useful in mapping extraterrestrial terrain. It might allow detailed analysis of a planet's surface from great distances.(?) I wonder if using a different frequency for the laser could cut (like X-rays) through thick, vaporous atmosphere allowing scientists to get data from hidden features on cloud-covered planets. This process has some interesting applications...

Re:Applications in Space Exploration

[The Grammar Jew]

X-rays? Nah, try radio. Venus was mapped with a radar (the link :)

Re:Applications in Space Exploration

[allanj]

It's been done to the good ol' Earth a number of times (including doing it from space). There are prospecting companies that use exactly this kind of detailed information in their search for natural resources (oil, minerals etc). Geologists use the same approach to search for ancient craters - even below water using sonar.
Since it's just radar and sonar all over again, most of the underlying technology has been around since WWII - it's just been refined to a point few probably imagined possible or worthwhile.

Commercial Viability

[superid]

Interesting and cool, but will need orders of magnitude better accuracy and precision before it could be a viable replacement for commercial coordinate measuring machines such as the ones built by Brown and Sharpe. They say they can "split the micron" which is pretty impressive.

Their CMMs are for a completely different market though...more manufacturing oriented.

UMass is too.

[GrEp]

The Univeristy of Mass. (Amherst) has been doing some cool stuff with 3D modeling of images too. Check it out.

Ascender II Project

How is this new?

[ChristianBaekkelund]

3D scanners using radar, lidar, the works have been around for a long time now...so what's new here?

The visual effects industry regularly makes models and puts them in a 3D scanner to get a basic mesh to work from. Also, the vfx industry regularly takes full lidar sweeps of outdoor sets to more easily do match-moves, make mattes, and such. For example, see: http://www.vfxpro.com/.getarticle/.772 954741 and http:/ /www.digitalpostproduction.com/Htm/Features/ScanMa ster/ScanMasters.htm

Heck, do a search for 3D scanner, and you come up with tons of hits...here's a couple:

• http://www.3dscanners.com/
• http://www.minolta3d.com/
• http://www.cyra.com/hdwrdesc.html
• http://www.3dlasermapping.com/serv_faq. html

So can someone please tell me what the big news is? Is is the resolution, I take it?...That IS pretty small and pretty cool...

Re:How is this new?

[Vireo]

I also know of a company, InSpeck, which makes 3D scanners for objects and humans but without using lasers, just white light.

Re:Anna Kournikova

[dattaway]

Nice pictures, too bad it requires enabling the potentialy evil java to open them up.

Why do more and more people insist on using java for a simple link to a picture? To prevent a wget by a happy surfer? To play games? Me thinks a patch to wget for snarfing addresses out of javascript is in order so one could assemble a viewable page for one's own viewing with a simple browser.

meshing for fun and meshing for science

[penguin_nipple]

It seems that these guys are attempting to use their meshing and modelling routines to find inconsistencies and texturing details in the actual stone

This type of work (attempting to detect very small scale irregularities in materials) is far different than modelling an item and creating a 3 dimensional picture of that object, or creating a flashy new quake 3 skin .

Kudos to these guys for using (and creating) some really complex algorithms. Being in the field of 3D visualizations , I can appreciate the amount of time, energy and brainpower which go into a project such as this.

*penguin_nipple stands and applaudes*

"Those boys at Stanford"?

[LiamQ]

To the article submitter who referred to "Those boys at Stanford", have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, some of those Stanford researchers might not be boys?

Now the project link appears to be slashdotted, so I can't actually confirm that the project doesn't feature all "boys", but I suspect that this is not the case. And even if it is, I think it would be better not to emphasize this in light of some of the recent Slashdot articles about gender issues.

Maybe I'm overreacting, but I'd like to see the day when more than 5% of my Computer Science class is female, and I don't think girls hearing about "Those boys at Stanford" will help that.

The problems with mesh...

[nutty]

I've worked with just such machines, only on a smaller scale, and I have one fundamental complaint, the resulting object becomes imported as a mesh.

Oh, fine you say, thats the same as 3D studio uses, thats swell, right? wrong.

During the past year I have painstakingly reverse-engineering the childrens toy the bumble ball. This was done all in Mechanical Desktop 4 and Inventor 2.

Because of the details involved with the interior mechanics, I, along with my partner, when we turned to 3d studio to produce an animation, we found that mesh is nooo substitute for extrutions and constraints. Since the entire bumble ball is round, and all its features as well, the triangle constructions were autrotious. When we made a 3d model out of it using Stereo Lithography (SLA) it wasn't at all as nice as we had expected.

And then I looked over to all the other groups who were also reverse engineering things, and saw they're troubled 3d studio projects, and i simply refused to use it. I was happily rewarded when I was given the oportunity to use inventor 2, which, in accordance with autodesks file formats, is built on extrutions and constraints. Mmmmm...

Later into the year, when we were nearing completion, i saw what some students had '3d scanned', and it was a mess. What happens is that the scanner doesnt pick up a chamfer or a c' sink hole or an array, the object imports as a mesh. Mesh's might be swell to look at, but they're worthless to work with.

Ok, i'm done ranting. Oh, and by the way, I'm a sophmore in high school. :)

/nutt

---
And please dont comment on my spelling..

Re:The problems with mesh...

[dublin]

Congratulations, you've just learned the first real lesson CAD engineers have to face all the time: The *way* a shape is expressed determines what it's useful for.

This is really nothing new, in fact a lot of the old B-Rep (Boundary Representation, defining the containing surface of a shape) vs. CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry, defining how a shape is built up from geometric primitives) battle centered around the fact that the models have different strengths.

In fact, this argument predates 3-D modelling - if you've ever dealt with early "stupid" CAD translators (AutoCAD's being a prime example), you know that there's a *huge* difference between defining a 3-D surface with IGES entity type 102 (IIRC) - the "copious data" type, defining a gazillion points along a path, and a conic equation for that path. The latter is more accurate, infinitely scalable, and takes up a lot less space, unfortunately, the former is easier. (Try building an NC program to cut a surface from a gazillion points and you'll soon realize two things: 1) It's a great way to take a very expensive high speed machine tool and make it *very* slow, and 2) you will have to jump through all kinds of izarre hoops to handle streaming the data, since the poor controller does NOT have enought memory for this kind of abuse.

Of course data formats matter here.

And it never will.

[yerricde]

Take the USA for example. The Constitution says that authors' exclusive rights must be "for limited times"; it doesn't say how limited. Limited to 999,999 years? Still limited.

The Walt Disney Company has been taking advantage of this loophole for years. Every time the copyright on early Mickey Mouse cartoons gets close to expiring, Disney just buys a 20-year retroactive extension.

Public domain

[underwhelm]

If something is in the public domain, derivative works are equally public.

That's what public domain means.

Marc LeVoy

[Animats]

This is Marc LeVoy's thing. He came to Stanford with a background in reducing data from medical volumetric scanners, either X-ray (CT scanners) or nuclear magnetic resonance (MRI scanners). He's big on the problem of reducing vast amounts of scanner data into some useful form.