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Disney Research Creates Megastereo - Panoramas With Depth

Posted by samzenpus on from the getting-a-good-look dept.

mikejuk writes "Disney Research has made a breakthrough in implementing the technique of acquiring depth information from a simple camera scan of a scene. For a perfect panorama you need to rotate the camera around its optical center, i.e. just rotate the camera. However, if you just rotate the camera about itself you don't get any parallax effects — which is why it makes the stitching together easier. If you want to get 3D information from the sequence of shots you need parallax. This means rotating the camera mounted on an offset arm or just moving the camera along an arc in your outstretched hand. The big problem with this method is that the parallax makes it more difficult to fit the mosaic together, and this is the problem that the research team has been working on. Using a range of different scanning methods the results can be converted into high resolution panoramas automatically complete with 3D information."

3 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Curious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes there are. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superresolution for methods and limitations. They are not yet in movie-scale but can convert a sequence of images from a single rigid target into a more detailed one if sub-pixel accurate registration is done between images.

  2. Disney Creates? by onyxruby · · Score: 3, Informative

    Anytime someone reads Disney creates they should substitute the word "copies" until proven otherwise. Disney has a long and storied history of intellectual property theft when it was in their best interest. They are arguably the greatest hypocrites in the world about IP, even more so than Hollywood themselves. They are always the ones that hold the most radical of views in the MPAA and are very quick to hold condemn anyone else and take away their rights. They have also been stealing from the public domain and other individuals for ideas for decades. A quick Google search can find example upon example of their bad behavior.

    1. Re:Disney Creates? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Disclaimer: I used to work for Disney Research.

      This may be true of other parts of Disney, but Disney Research is only a few years old, is managed by researchers, operates pretty much independently like an academic institution (though with the goal of developing tools the rest of Disney can use) and everything I've seen has been to the highest standards of scholarship. Take a look at the SIGGRAPH publications here: http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/ From the last few SIGGRAPHs and SIGGRAPH Asias almost 10% of the papers are from Disney Research (and they're mostly good ones too).

      A comment above says "So it's a breakthrough, but a very old one and, more importantly, somebody else's" -- but if you actually open the paper, you'll see that the very first comparison is to that previous work and the improvement is getting the quality and speed to the point of being usable. Anyone who's done research knows there are (almost) no "breakthroughs" -- only building on ideas prior researchers head.