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Making 3D Models from Video Clips

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the fun-toys dept.

BoingBoing is covering an interesting piece of software called VideoTrace that allows you to easily create 3D models from the images in video clips. "The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modeled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model."

4 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Terrible link by masterz · · Score: 5, Informative

    wow, what a terrible link.

    A quick search turns up the project homepage http://www.acvt.com.au/research/videotrace/

  2. Software for 2D images for 3D models is not new by bn0p · · Score: 5, Informative

    Software like Canoma from the now-defunct Metacreations would let you create 3D models from 2D images in the mid-to-late 90s. I also remember reading about people using Viz ImageModeler to convert images from video to models even though the software is also designed for still images - the users would just capture those frames they needed to create the 3D model.

    The only thing "new" about this is using video as the input without having to grab the individual frames yourself.


    Never let reality temper imagination

    --
    Never let reality temper imagination
    1. Re:Software for 2D images for 3D models is not new by samkass · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yeah, the big breakthrough in this, IMHO, was a 1994 paper by Takeo Kanade of CMU's Robotics Institute titled "A Sequential Factorization Method for Recovering Shape and Motion from Image Streams", which did a pretty good job of factorizing out the 3D model as well as the camera motion from a video stream... it could tell you not only the dimensions of the house you were videotaping, but the stride of the person holding the camera. This laid the groundwork for a lot of other "model from video" work done throughout the 90's. More recently a group there has done a lot of work on "Shape from Sillouette" which looks closer to the technology that this product uses.

      I've been waiting for this technology to go big on eBay for a decade... maybe this'll be the year.

      --
      E pluribus unum
  3. Youtube by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vda2RAEuW_g