Slashdot Mirror
Google Earth Beaten By Autorendering From Photos
Flu writes "Sweden's major engineer newspaper NyTeknik writes about a new technology which is used to automatically convert 60.000 aerial photographs of Stockholm, Sweden, into a 3d-world, similar to Google Earth's rendering of major buildings in some US cities. But unlike Google's laser-measured rendering, this technique took less than 8 days (including the photography) to automatically generate the 3D-model of Stockholm — which includes every building and details as high as individual trees!
The program was developed by C3, a subsidiary of the Swedish defense industry company SAAB, together with a PC gaming company called Agency 9. The complete article is available (sorry, Swedish only), but the 3D-rendering of Stockholm is available as a Java applet from the Swedish phone-dictionary service Hitta.se (tick the checkbox — it's an ordinary disclaimer, and click 'Till 3D-kartan')." The technique used gives a cool water-color look to the scenes, too.
does playing with the maps count as RTFA ?
http://revj.sourceforge.net
How long until someone uses technology like this to do a GTA-like in actual New York City, with real buildings as opposed to Liberty City? Admittedly, that would start getting creepy when you realize those are real residences and the like.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
There is no stranger marriage.
they include bikini clad Swedish babes.
all the buildings in Stockholm are partially melted, this must prove global warming!!!
This kind of model is what you get when you take the point cloud from Photosynth, mesh it and use the photos as textures.
The techniques for recovering 3D shape from photographs have been well known for a while. But if all the pictures you use for the 3D reconstruction are from overhead, the street level view will be missing all the stuff you can't see from overhead. It may be called a "3D model", but it's not a complete or accurate 3D model.
If you want decent street level views, you really do need street level photographs. And laser scanners are still a lot more reliable than image based 3D reconstruction.
I can literally see my house from here.
While kind of cool, some buildings and roads get rather squiggly.
There are 010 kinds of people. Those who understand octal, those who don't, and 06 other kinds of morons.
I believe the majority of /.'s audience is international, though obviously not Swedish. Someone from VA would have to confirm this.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The 3D map looks more like post-apocalyptic Stockholm.
Now, were you trying to suggest that a majority of
why are you guys bashing on this? "oh its crap cuz its not perfect???" its still freakin cool that it can be done simply from a bunch of aerial photos. i think its cool as hell and i look forward to it being even more refined. time to make some game maps, like CS or GTA.
That's awesome! The story broke my Bork! filter, though.
I'm posting the article in English here with some changes due to Translate.Google not being able to translate everything 100%.
---
Hitta.se beats Google Earth
with new 3D-technology from Saab.
Search company Hitta.se has a new Web service that is better than Google Earth to show Sweden in a 3D view. In Stockholm there, for example, every single building as a realistic 3D model.
With the help of robotics from Saab and the Swedish software for computer games Hitta.se search company has developed a Web service that shows Sweden in 3D and which is clearly better than the corresponding service from Google Earth.
Directly in the browser, users can zoom in, tilt and turn the flygfotograferade views across the country. With the help of altitude measurements images of the land are created where the mountains and valleys appear with genuine feeling of depth.
The new service, which launched May 29, is also all buildings from Stockholm, in the form of realistic 3D models.
Although they can be turned and turned and seen from any height and angle.
Later this year, including the second appearance of Sweden's largest cities as a complete 3-D models.
The major competitor in the show Sweden in 3D is Google Earth. But there are only a few dozen 3-D buildings from Stockholm and a few other cities.
Google's 3D view of Sweden was also much lower quality than that Hitta.se offer. Both in terms of image resolution and altitude.
-- We have created 3-D feature to give users a more fun and more realistic ways to use our maps, "says Rui de Sousa Brit who is president and CEO of Hitta.se
But the new service does not yet cover all planned features. Therefore, it's "sneak launched" and goes by the name of "the lab" on the company's website.
Moreover, such as some 3D buildings refined when the houses angles can be a little crooked and some facades have bad sharpness.
The technology used was developed by the Swedish companies C3 Technologies in LinkÃping and Agency9 in Lulea.
C3 is a subsidiary of Saab and develop technology that has its origin in seeker for robots.
The technology is based on high resolution aerial photography with carefully calibrated cameras. In order to build 3-D model of Stockholm, which covers an area of 200 square kilometres was 60 000 images from 600 metres above sea level, which took three days.
Then, it took only a few more days to automatically create 3-D model, where even individual trees are included.
Tommy Johansson who is president and CEO of C3 know that some defence in the world have developed similar technology. But he is not aware of anyone else who introduced the technology for civilian purposes.
-- We aim to launch our technology globally and believe that, for example, urban planners and businesses similar Hitta.se can become our customers, "says Tommy Johansson.
Other companies based 3-D models of entire cities primarily use lasermÃtningar to collect 3D data. For example, Google and Microsoft for their service Virtual Earth.
It is a technology that is much more costly and time consuming than the C3's way.
Photo and mapping services from Google and Microsoft require users to install special software on your own computer. In Google Earth in the form of a stand-alone program and the Virtual Earth as a plug which is available only for Windows.
But Hitta.se 3D runs directly into the browser by using javateknik and works for most operating systems and browsers.
-- I think that both Google and Microsoft may have some problems with sleep when they see the new service from hitta.se, "says Tommy Johansson.
In order to be able to present all 3D data in the new map in the form of realistic buildings used technology developed for computer games.
It comes from the Agency 9 of Lulea.
The company began by building a so-called rendering engine for web games. Eg. software that draws up 3D environments on the computer screen.
-- But the web
Google to acquire SAAB
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The language is irrelevant as nobody reads the articles anyway.
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
Dunno what's the big deal about, I can't even get the thing to work, it just takes up both CPU's and doesn't show anything... On the other hand I can start up Google Earth and it will work in seconds. But that may be some software bug on my side, whatever.
/.-reading tourist. And, mind you, catching up to Google's amount of maps and images and databases would not be an easy thing to do.
Anyway, I'm sure this may be cool for people in Stockholm, but unless they plan to expand this to worldwide scale, this will just remain another web's curiosity for the bored and an occasional
I think Linux isn't better than Windows hence in the slashdot realm I'm a troll
it's kind of scary when you zoom out the whole map and see a "flat world with only Sweeden in the middle.." ... =)
There may be dragons...
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
Not sure if its a java bug or not. Guess I'll try to debug. I love open source.
Looks like Google is the new Micro$oft for Slashdotters. Any IT company that dominates the market share is the enemy?
It seems as if the geometries are calculated from scratch in real time.
;)
This article is gonna have quite an effect on their servers
At first I though: *yuch* this is awful with the geometries being at very low resolution and with strong artifacts. But as the script kept processing it's looking really good by now, except that it's still hour-glassing and I can't zoom in after minutes.
Do not apologize for Swedish-only! Ingmar Bergman movies are Swedish-only!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I thought the reason why Google Maps didn't have ultra-high resolution images was because of government restrictions.
Beaten how, exactly? This is just one city. Google Earth covers a heck of a lot more than once city. Sure, the rendering is fine, but again, compared to Google Earth as a whole... eh, not what I'd call "beating Google Earth" by any stretch.
Looks like Stockholm is melting to me! I'm not so sure the accuracy of the technique can compete with Google's current results. This would certainly be a nice "first pass" to get full coverage of a region to be later improved upon by more accurate methods.
Okay, I've been waiting for a good 3D rendering of The Pirate Bay -- and all those cute blonde Swedish girls they mention.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Very nice. It's beautiful from high angles, and not too bad from low angles. (Middle-click and hold to change view angle, mouse wheel to zoom, left click to pan.) They put in enough photographs to have side images for most of the buildings. It's really impressive when you look at a courtyard from the inside.
There seems to be some support beyond the height-map level. It usually misunderstands bridges, but in at least one place, it got a multi-level situation right, so they have the right machinery, they just need more oblique photos in the difficult areas.
Considering most of the high-res aerial mapping is done on a county-by-county basis (rarely even state-wide) the large number of governmental agencies Google would need to contract with to provide sub-foot imaging is immense. The most common user of high-res aerial mapping is county GIS departments, and very few of them ask for the overlapping stereo images needed to model heights. (Or you could do it with lidar, but again most county auditors have little use for the height data.)
The COE is still so far back in the stone-ages they want traditional sections run, and are not large users of aerial mapping. (Not as large as they should be.)
That said, the volume of high-res photos out there is huge. We just finished up a state-wide lidar job of XXXXX, with elevations provided (post vegetation and building removal) tight enough to provide 6" contours. The accompanying images are 3" resolution. Where can you get the images? I have no idea.
We do similar work for the FAA. (Only practical way to do obstruction surveys is with photogramitry.) Do they release those 1/4' images? I do not know.
There is no reason to believe Google shows poor-quality images for any reason outside an unwillingness to pay for the acquisition.
Have you seen the high-res obliques Microsoft provides now? Those clearly aren't banned in the name of security.
Ask your local Auditor for a copy of their aerial mapping data - often it is free or for a nominal fee. (varies county by county and state by state in my experience, everything from 10 DVDs for free to $100 per CD)
Could it run any slower?
Greg Raven
As long as there's any left, I'll take mine first.
OMG - Stockholm has been hit by an earthqua... oh wait... there it goes...
this is great! Let me zoom in...
OMG - Stockholm has been hit by an earthquake!
of this new software is that it seems to be fairly automated from the start. Maps all around the world are created using aerial photography, and all the DEM's (digital elevation models) usually represented by contour lines were made by people digitising by hand from stereo aerial photography. This method has created a 3D model of a whole city, in 6 days, I reckon mainly using automatic methods of image matching and DEM creation. There are aerial laser scanners which do the same thing, but are very expensive. I can't look at the final product now, I reckon it got /.'ed into the ground, but the next 'clever' thing to do once you have a big ol' DEM is to make an algorithm that squares up the buildings! I wonder if we can digitise all the old film photography which covers a majority of the world, and image matching from that, can google automate the task of creating a DEM of the entire world to accuracies of less than 1m ? That would be cool.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
Only 60 images?
Netcraft confirms it.
Sweden looks good from reasonable flying height.
Anything lower and I'd expect ghouls and zombies to start leaping out at me.
So... how many people just clicked through the java applet "trust this provider" thing? How many people stopped to think "Hmm, maybe this is the swedish intelligence service trying to 0wn my system"?
And, for our Swedish readers, I'll translate it back for you I'm.
...and so on -- I'm.
---------
Heetta.se-a beets Guugle-a Iert I'm
veet noo 3D-technulugy frum Seeb I'm. Bork Bork Bork! I'm
Seerch cumpuny Heetta.se-a hes a noo Veb serfeece-a thet is better thun Guugle-a Iert tu shoo Svedee in a 3D feeoo. I'm In Stuckhulm zeere-a, fur ixemple-a, ifery seengle-a booeelding es a reeleestic 3D mudel I'm. Bork Bork Bork! I'm
> It seems as if the geometries are calculated from scratch in real time.
That wasy my initial thought, but (having watched it load, but not read the (F) article) now I'm thinking perhaps it's just an incremental load of a height field.
The height-field v. polygon guess is also supported by seeing how bridges are handled - for example, with flat sides that include images of boats striped up them.
Please do not play your own life-like maps in your own jurisdiction. Just swap your "High School" map for someone else's and everything is fine.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Sixty point zero zero zero images doesn't sound like much.
Google should acquire Sweden!
Any minute now we'll find ourselves foot-deep in Neil Stephenson's terrifying vision of the Internet. Except it won't suck like Second Life did.
Does it mean "We've been slashdotted", our nifty new technology relies on active-x and therefore can't scale for beans.... Not to mention it's lack of security.
"Java-uppdatering
Dina drivrutiner Ãr inte uppdaterade. FÃr att kunna kÃra "hitta.se 3D" behÃver du uppdatera till senaste drivrutinerna.
Mer information om vad som krÃvs fÃr att kÃra hitta.se 3D hittar du i FrÃ¥gor & svar"
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is sort of cool. It's kind of like an impressionist model. I'm not exactly sure why the applet seems like it's interpreting and processing all the data locally though... Kind of slow. I could imagine this sort of thing being handy for quick pre-vis stuff I do all the time at my architecture job. That is if it looked sharper. Right now it's a bit amorphous.
...and when it asks "Install ActiveX Zombie Client", click OK -- it's an ordinary dialog.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
It's a neat idea but the resulting geometry is just awful. It might be good for "quick and dirty" scans of unmodeled areas, but this definitely cannot beat a human being creating a model and skinning it.
So unless the metric is making building look all melted and asymmetrical, then I guess it does beat Google Earth.
This confirms my theory that Sweden is one big giant Marshmallow.
This is certainly Java related... it's a Java applet that is handling the rendering/visualization. :-D
It's FAST!!!!
Thank's for posting this! I didn't know Stockholm was so beautiful!
Once Google realizes most building plans in major cities are public records accessible through FOIA requests your particular cubicle in that cubicle farm in Redmond will be accurately rendered.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Probably mostly international just comparing the numbers but the majority probably speak English.
I can see my house from here :-D
[waves back to slashdot crowd!]
The cup is always half empty for you isn't it?
This cup isn't "half empty", it's nearly completely empty. Melted 3D shapes viewable only from overhead are not an alternative to street level laser scanning. This isn't a new promising idea, it's an idea that's been around for decades and that simply does not lead to usable 3D models.
If people take hype and lies like "Google Earth beaten by autorendering from photos." as truth, then the funding to do the hard science and engineering to make this work for real disappears. More than one promising technology has been killed by hype like this.
So, if you don't want progress to grind to a halt, start thinking a bit more critically and opposed hype.
If you want to see high quality 3D reconstructions from aerial photographs, go here:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/267813.html
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5073723324007466679
I don't know why this has happened, but I got a very nasty BSOD from my video card (igxpdv64.sys, onboard Intel G965 Express on an Asus mb) when loading the applet (Firefox 2, Win XP x64). I felt compelled to report this because this phenomenon (BSOD caused by a web browser, of from java in general) has never happened to me in my 20 years of computing.
Anybody wanna play worms 3d in Stockholm?
First it asks to run without security restrictions. I don't understand why because all it needs is screen space and a connection to their server, but ok, the signature looks okay, let's let it slide for now. First images of melting Stockholm look okay, then suddenly the browser locks up and sucks up so much CPU time that even alt-tab becomes slow. I had to terminate it using Process Explorer, which by the way is telling me that it was messing around in my Application Data folder... it doesn't seem to have done anything else, but perhaps that's just because I didn't run it long enough. This was the last time I click 'Run' on Java's 'this signature is trusted, let it run without security restrictions' dialog. What, by the way, is the deal with that dialog? Only in the help page for the dialog does it mention that it will run the applet without security restrictions, the dialog itself doesn't mention this at all. Where the developers at Sun daydreaming when they coded that? Anyway, to cut a long rant short, I'll end with some friendly advice: don't navigate to that page.
"Zooma ut"??? What the hell does that mean???
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Now next time I spend (waste?) 15 minutes watching them zoom around the city I can actually have a clue where they are heh.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
Those images were created using a stereo camera and photogrammetry.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/267813.html
Why do jerks like you insist on presenting things they imagine to be true as fact?
I usually see some papers on automated-computer architecture at the annual SIGGRAPH meeting. I didnt see such in the just-announced primarly ppaers section, but there might be stuff in the secondary sessions. www.siggraph.com
The chief accomplishment is not that this produces better results than what Google or MSN Live has to offer. It doesn't. There are a lot of odd things, many shapes are a bit off, it can't handle tall buildings at all and if you have something like a bridge the ground level rises up to it. Still, if you're gonna go out and measure every house using lasers, we'll only see 3D views of the biggest US cities. This way it is possible to do it for smaller places, like little Sweden.
Hats off for Hitta, they've done a great job together with their partners in bringing cool funcionality to Sweden.