Stanford's New Website Converts Your Photos to 3D

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Stanford has a new website that not only shows you how cool their new 3-d modeling system is, but actually allows you to give it a try with your own photos. The system can take a 2-d still image and estimate a detailed 3-d structure which you can navigate. "For each small homogeneous patch in the image, we use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to infer a set of "plane parameters" that capture both the 3-d location and 3-d orientation of the patch. The MRF, trained via supervised learning, models both image depth cues as well as the relationships between different parts of the image. Other than assuming that the environment is made up of a number of small planes, our model makes no explicit assumptions about the structure of the scene; this enables the algorithm to capture much more detailed 3-d structure than does prior art (such as Saxena et al., 2005, Delage et al., 2005, and Hoiem et el., 2005), and also give a much richer experience in the 3-d flythroughs created using image-based rendering, even for scenes with significant non-vertical structure."

Comments

Photosynth

[blankinthefill]

While I know you're all Microsoft haters, bear with me for a minute. This sounds a lot like this Photosynth demonstration. The relevant part of the video starts at about 3:50, but the whole video is really interesting and I would suggest watching it.

Re:Photosynth

[nguy]

Photosynth takes multiple shots, this apparently takes a single shot. And although Photosynth is some nice engineering, (1) it wasn't all developed at Microsoft, and (2) it relies on decades of research work done elsewhere.

Microsoft does invest a lot of money in research. But what they are spending pales in comparison to all the work by other people that they are building on.

Re:Slashdotted

[alta]

No kidding, who would have ever thought that putting a link to /. to a service that does IMAGE PROCESSING was a good idea. Image processing is intensive on any server. Hell, lately /. can't even handle /.'s loads. It took 2 minutes to load this comment page, and earlier I was getting 300 errors when trying to read comments!

Re:Used for navigation systems?

[disckitty]

Judging from the google cached pages, it looks like that's precisely what his research is for. Google cached pages: here, and here, and here

Re:It's not slashdotted.

[longacre]

I'm a \. subscriber and saw this story about 2 minutes before it went live to the masses. In that time, I was able to successfully visit the site and register. By the time I logged in, however, the \. post had gone live, and the Stanford site stopped working altogether. So it was indeed \. that crashed the site, not YouTube.