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Laser-Scanning U.S. Landmarks
MeanMF writes "The New York Daily News reports in this article that the National Park Service is creating detailed 3-D maps of national monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore using high-resolution laser scanners. Their goal is to create highly-accurate blueprints that can be used to reconstruct the monuments if they are damaged by a terrorist attack or other means." The same story is also available at Yahoo!.
boy, if you think this is waste, I've got a few government agencies to sell you. this is probably one of the better uses of our tax dollars (relatively speaking).
About two years ago, I worked for Cyra, the company whose Cyrax 2500 they are using to scan these monuments. The device is pretty cool, but expensive at US $125,000 for one unit, not including any license seats of the Cyclone software you need to manipulate the HUGE data sets that the device generates. All you get from the device is a cloud of individual points. It really takes the software that runs on the PC (Cyclone) to turn the point clouds into surfaces and then into files compatible with CAD systems like AutoCAD and Microstation.
By the way, it is a good thing that none of these monuments that they are scanning with the Cyrax 2500 are red. The green laser used by the unit doesn't even see some shades of red. There was a bright red toolbox in the lab that would crash the scanner every time until we got the "no-return timeout" code right.
It's too bad the company is in such a bad financial situation. The device is really cool, but the slowing US economy has really put the brakes on large capital expenditures like the Cyrax 2500, even though many studies have shown that the labor costs savings and the improved accuracy of the results more than make up for the cost of the device and the training.
For those of you who live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a Cyrax 2400 (the previous model) was used to scan the existing I-880 / US-101 interchange in order to obtain a starting point for designing the new interchange they are currently building. The next time you are travelling south-bound on I-880 near the Montague Expressway exit, look at the paved shoulder and see if the spray-painted "scan 101" etc. marks are still there, indicating where the parked the "scan van" to take each of the scans they stitched together to get the entire interchange model.
I guess I've rambled on long enough...
Yesterday it worked; today it is not working; Windows is like that...
It actually wasn't the Italians, but a team from my alma mater, Stanford University, lead by professor Marc Levoy. While I wasn't directly involved in the project myself, I knew many of the folks behind it.
The project site is http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/mich/
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