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Building 3D Models On the Fly With a Webcam

Posted by kdawson on from the do-you-see-what-i-see dept.

blee37 writes "Here is an excellent video demonstration of a new program developed by Qi Pan, a graduate student, and other researchers at the University of Cambridge. The 'ProFORMA' software constructs a 3D model of an object in real time from (commodity) webcam video. The user can watch the program deduce more pieces of the 3D model as the object is moved and rotated. The resulting graphics are of high quality."

2 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. 3D vision for robots by cptnapalm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was thinking about robots one day and I was wondering why those who work on computer vision didn't do something like this. Instead of trying to get the machine to understand the analog world, why wouldn't it be better for the machine to have an internal representation of the world by making a 3d map? Quake 3 CoffeeShop, if you will.

    The idea I had was that the vision system creates a 3d map with entities, mapped from the vision system as well, inside. The AI works within the 3d representation of the world. If the AI wants to move from A to B, it signals the body controlling subsystem to start walking. When the 3d representation, being informed by the vision system, tells the AI that it is at point B, then the AI signals to stop walking.

    Hardware constraints not withstanding, is this model any good?

    I'm just a lowly, early middle aged novice C programmer who has never actually done anything with robotics, so if what I said made no sense or is obviously idiotic, I do understand that my ideas are comin' outta my ass.

  2. Academic projects versus commercial applications by Frans+Faase · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There seems to be a huge gap between these kind of academic projects and the commercial available programs. I have come across several commenrcial applications that can do these kind of things, but these applications cost at least a 1000 dollars or even more. And then there are all these academic projects (going on for at least two decades), which present nice video's and papers, and sometimes release some software. But when you look at the software, you discover that you first have to download nine other package and compile the whole thing and what you get is some kind of script you have to run, with all sorts of command line options. But sofar, I have never found an application with a solid interface on the level of the Gimp or Blender for the matter of the fact. I find this rather strange. I am almost getting the impression that some of the results are sold to the developers of the commercial packages.