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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."
Wow, can you imagine how cool this would be with respect to video games? Drop in some photos, crank up the customized first person shooter, and zoooom! You could even take photos or shots from movies and do the same thing (e.g., using Star Wars stills).
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Could this type of technology be used for robots to allow them to identify what the 3d layout of the world around them is? Seems like a pretty powerful tool in that area.
I tried it - it converts your face into a Mars flyby.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Damn - I was hoping for someone to upload a picture of a pair of breasts to see how well it worked.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
Dammit, and all this time I've been decrying the impossible magical 3-d photo processing in Blade Runner! Curse my skepticism!
--Tedb0t
Limina.Log
Yep. I wonder if we can get a 3-D image of their server room on fire.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It is not slashdotted. The server crashed after I gave it an image of the impossible triangle.
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.
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Slashdot has a new website that not only shows you how cool their new hardware melting system is, but actually allows you to give it a try with your own servers.
My 0.02 cents
And what, dear Slashdot reader, would your reference be to see if they look real enough or not?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
This would be sweet if they took all the imagery from google maps/streets and build out little virtual cities with no headed pedestrians and 5 legged dogs.
Several years ago I worked at a german university where recognizing of human faces was researched. We also did 3D reconstruction of faces, which was useful for training some algorithms. Although the technique is very different, 3D reconstruction from 2D images is not that new. Some examples can still be seen here: link
High Speed Connection + p2p program = lots of references
Hell, you need a reference? I've got a few gigs of references here for ya...
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
My mom's just upstairs.
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!
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
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;
Darn. My photos tend to be mostly of helicopters and boats.
Radar and Lidar are good for some applications, but they're fundamentally quite different. They're both active sensing technologies- they send out energy in part of the electromagnetic spectrum and then look in that narrow range of the spectrum and see what bounces back. This means that you have trouble seeing things farther away since you'd have to throw more and more energy to keep your samples uniformly bright or uniformly spaced. And it means your power requirements are much higher.
I think the most interesting part of computer vision is that which deals with passive sensing, such as this work. It senses the electromagnetic radiation that comes from our sun, or moon, or man-made sources. By using the same spectrum that our eyes use it should be able to get a qualitative understanding of the world similar to what humans can achieve.
Also, as humans we've built the world to be visually interpreted at the EM frequencies that we sense. This means our signs are readable in those frequencies, our indoor lighting works in those frequencies, etc... By sensing in those frequencies you make sure you don't miss anything that humans can see.
Well no matter how bad they look, they'll still look better than mine.
Brian.
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.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
I never thought I would see anybody spell /. wrong!
Take off every 'sig' !!
It's not a spelling error. He's obviously a Windows user.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!