Automatic 3D Reconstruction of Scenes

Neil Halelamien writes "New Scientist reports on a piece of software by MDRobotics called instant Scene modeler (iSM), which automatically generates 3D reconstructions of scenes, using a few hundred frames from a pair of ordinary video cameras. The software uses David Lowe's SIFT vision algorithm to quickly locate common features between sequential images, for use in the reconstruction; SIFT has also been useful for generating panoramas and object recognition. MDRobotics has a demo page showing the software being used for crime scene reconstruction, along with animated GIFs of input video and the resulting 3D model."

Comments

Sounds Bogus

[menace3society]

This reminds me of the bit in Enemy of the State where the government operatives take the lingerie store security footage, and then use their computer to "rotate the camer 90 degrees." And on top of that, they then see something in the bag that wouldn't have been at all detectable from the actual camera's angle.

It's pretty silly to suppose that this thing will be able to generate a 3-D representation of a scene without without getting highly-detailed footage of everything from every angle. Otherwise, it would just be a completely bogus modelling system to pull a fast one on people who don't know any better. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, although the original crime scene evidence photos don't show it, when you look rotate the angle and look at the far side of the desk, the defendent's fingerprints are clearly visible"

Re:Sounds Bogus

[drinkypoo]

People have been working on this particular problem for a lot longer than you'd think and there have been methods for creating 3d meshes from 2d video for quite some time now, shown at siggraph, and so on. There are at least tens of books on this and related subjects. Anyway you are exaggerating the problem. Obviously it will not be able to get information from anything it can't see, and without moving around and through a scene all you're going to have is a bunch of contour maps with empty back sides. This is still a huge improvement over having no 3d data at all. It will immediately be a gigantic boon to compositing animators, who will be able to get depth cues from 2d video.