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3D Aerial Photos For the Common Man

Posted by samzenpus on from the personal-landscapes dept.

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!"

6 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. If you want to do this, do it now by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is so going to be made illegal when more people start taking high resolution pictures of their neighbors' swimming pools.

    1. Re:If you want to do this, do it now by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's gonna be illegal anyway, because only a terrorist or pedophile would use the technology, probably to plan out the shortest paths to bomb government buildings or rape kids at the parks.

      Even worse, the so-called "hobbyist" could use the data to make a 3-D video game about bombing government buildings or raping kids and release it under that Marxist GPL license, which would inflame tensions in the Middle East and provoke Iran into destroying Israel.

  2. The real reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    >"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.

    1. Re:The real reason by BitHive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think I can see why AI research doesn't pay your bills.

  3. Re:I say it all the time, Vision to 3d world = AI by EdZ · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?"

  4. Kite Aerial Photography.... by syousef · · Score: 3, Informative

    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