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

Games?

[webword]

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).

Re:Games?

[Toonol]

I bet that the majority of schools in the nation have been converted to first-person shooter maps already. I know every school in my town had been, and that was back during the Quake/Duke Nukem days.

But don't tell the media that.

Used for navigation systems?

[pwnies]

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.

For those that can't get in

[eclectro]

I tried it - it converts your face into a Mars flyby.

Re:Slashdotted

[Amorymeltzer]

Damn - I was hoping for someone to upload a picture of a pair of breasts to see how well it worked.

Blade Runner anyone?

[virgil_disgr4ce]

Dammit, and all this time I've been decrying the impossible magical 3-d photo processing in Blade Runner! Curse my skepticism!

--Tedb0t

Re:Slashdotted

[Perseid]

Yep. I wonder if we can get a 3-D image of their server room on fire.

Inside Story

[jd]

• "What do you mean, you can't give a demo to the President?"
• "Errr, we posted the link to Slashdot and the network melted."
• "And what's this requisition order for a 24 gigabit campus network?"
• "We need the extra bandwidth."
• "And if I don't approve it?"
• "We post a link to your cat's facebook page."
• "Nooooooooooooooooooooo!"

!Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not slashdotted. The server crashed after I gave it an image of the impossible triangle.

Re:!Slashdotted

[howdoesth]

This is why we can't have nice things.

Re:!Slashdotted

[Chrutil]

>> The server crashed after I gave it an image of the impossible triangle.

Actually - that one is really easy to do in 3D: http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2004/08/a_really_cool_3.html

Re:Slashdotted

[alx5000]

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.

Re:Slashdotted

[Rude Turnip]

And what, dear Slashdot reader, would your reference be to see if they look real enough or not?

Not so new

[dfunked]

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

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!

seems limited

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Slashdotted

[nmg196]

Well no matter how bad they look, they'll still look better than mine.
Brian.

Re:It's not slashdotted.

[FormOfActionBanana]

I never thought I would see anybody spell /. wrong!

Re:It's not slashdotted.

[bob.appleyard]

It's not a spelling error. He's obviously a Windows user.