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3D Aerial Photos For the Common Man
An anonymous reader writes "So you have a RC model aircraft snapping digital photos from the air, but how do you organize them all? This cheap cloud service from a European research giant will upload your photos and automatically convert them into 3D models you can navigate like a video game. And if you don't have a model aircraft, they got those on-the-cheap too. Let the overhead droning begin!"
This is so going to be made illegal when more people start taking high resolution pictures of their neighbors' swimming pools.
>"I kinda put off actually making Artificial Intelligence in 2002 until someone makes a nice piece of software that you can walk around buildings and turn them into Quake levels."
No you didn't. Hey, I put off flapping my arms and flying to the moon in 2002, because there wasn't a decent hotel there. Or maybe I'm talking shit. Certainly that's what I assume you are doing.
You "put it off" because neither you nor anyone else actually knows how to do it.
Would this work with aerial photographs that can be seen on google maps? That would cover a large area already.
I'd reason that wiring up Natural Language when having a large database of objects(nouns) would still be rather difficult, but not as difficult as changing camera feeds into 3d world representation.
With two cameras with a known separation, it's not that hard a problem at all. With one camera and a depth camera (Kinect), it's not hard at all. With one regular camera and a known motion, it's not that hard. With one camera and an unknown motion, it's a bit tricky. Mostof this is covered by Structure From Motion, or occasionally Structured Lighting.
3D data from 2D data is a bit tricky, but nowhere even close to being as hard as software that can understand natural language. Even PARSING natural language is hard enough for most systems. There are far more systems that can map a 3D environment than there are that can correctly recognise and respond to a simple sentence, e.g: "Computer, will it be rainy today?"
Several times I have seriously considered getting into doing this kind of business: aerial photos and surveys. I thought it would be both profitable and fun. And it probably is. But their "cheap" aerial reconnaissance drone costs almost $12,000.00 U.S. How much aerial surveying would it take to pay that back? A lot, I think.
I'm in a place with no good aerial photography and have considered doing it myself and adding the streets to openstreetmap. What's a good known system to get started with this?
You might check out TFA. They have a system to sell you (no prices).Draganfly will sell you one for about 10 grand. A quick consultation with Google gives prices from $400 up. I looked into this a while back for pretty much the same reason. A decent system that could get high enough to get over trees / hills / etc. and hold a big enough camera to get reasonable resolution would be closer to the 10K than $400. If you wanted to make a significant fraction of it yourself (like the camera mounts) you could get the price down a bit, but not a whole lot.
A good camera platform is still pretty pricey. Cheaper than a (real) helicopter for sure, but still takes some cash.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
with all the talk of aerial drones and such im wondering how long it will be before you can buy an mini antiaircraft battery to put in your backyard.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The cheap version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_aerial_photography
http://scotthaefner.com/kap/
http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/kaptoc.html
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer