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

Good Use for Importing Stationary Objects

[fcolari]

Educationally, people could truly "walk around" in a virtual museum. This is lightyears ahead of QuickTime VR(?) where one simply can rotate about one point and zoom in or out.

It's only going to work on stationary scenes, as that sleeping fellow showed us. Basically, anything from the Real World you want to "import" into VR will be much easier to do.

If anyone likes FPS, you could model a map based on real scenery.

Most inventions and technology came into being before people found a use for it. It just seems pretty darn cool if nothing else.

Set reconstruction from old movies

[Anonymous Coward]

Though the technology would need some additional improvements, it might be interesting to apply it to tracking shots in old movies (like Casablanca) and in addition to reconstructing the sets one could also replay a scene from a slighly different angle.

The other slight modification would be to combine the possible modification (getting a slightly different angle from an existing tracking shot) and build a stereo 3D image of the shot or film segment.