RE: VHS to VRML or STL

From: Charles Overy <charles_at_lgmmodel.com>
Date: Mon Apr 12 2004 - 23:55:55 EEST

Al,

There were two interesting papers presented on this topic last year at
SIGGRAPH. I believe one was by some Berkley students and the other by
University of Birmingham, UK but I could be wrong. Are these the papers
that you are referring to? I can dig out references if you need them.

I also found this work to be very interesting and wrote one of the authors
but never got a reply. To my knowledge this work has not made its way into
commercially available software. In addition, the papers that I saw were
directed at generating surfaces for rendering not solids. The one that
generated data directly from a video only created the very front surfaces of
the buildings, as it would have to, as those were the only surfaces
available to the algorithm. I can imagine that it would be a great deal of
work to generate the rest of the building as well as some sort of solid
ground surface.

The other program, Berkley I think, involved using a variety of data to
synthesize a full 3D neighborhood. Again this work was directed at creating
a render able scene. There was no attempts at solids and much of the visual
detail came from clever texture mapping not from surface detail generation.
In both cases the actual mesh geometry was fairly crude.

As I am sure you are aware there are a number of programs that generate 3D
data, with user input, from a series of static pictures. PhotoModeler,
Geometra, and the like. We have worked with demos of these and own
Imagemodeler. We find that they are useful only in limited cases.

We have also looked at LIDAR data for large geographic datasets. This has
potential to generate interesting RP models, however, again there are quite
large preprocessing requirements to make the data create a model that is
similar to what you would expect. For instance one of the interesting
artifacts in LIDAR data is that telephone poles appear as these large spikes
in otherwise smooth terrain. I imagine that one can create filters to
remove this type of artifact automatically but I have not see data
postprocessed this way.

Please let me know if you have any more data about this as it is a very
interesting line of inquiry.

Best

Charles Overy
Director, LGM

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi [mailto:owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi]On
> Behalf Of AHastbacka@aol.com
> Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 1:58 PM
> To: rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi
> Subject: VHS to VRML or STL
>
>
> I have read a couple of papers where the authors have talked
> about converting VHS footage of a variety of objects into VRML
> (3D)files.
> Does anyone on the list know of any software that is available to
> allow 3D digitizing via processing of video tapes? The end
> desired result is to get VRML or STL files.
>
> Regards,
> Al Hastbacka
>
>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi [mailto:owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi]On
> Behalf Of AHastbacka@aol.com
> Sent: Monday, April 12, 2004 1:58 PM
> To: rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi
> Subject: VHS to VRML or STL
>
>
> I have read a couple of papers where the authors have talked
> about converting VHS footage of a variety of objects into VRML
> (3D)files.
> Does anyone on the list know of any software that is available to
> allow 3D digitizing via processing of video tapes? The end
> desired result is to get VRML or STL files.
>
> Regards,
> Al Hastbacka
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 12 23:28:06 2004

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Jan 12 2010 - 19:37:11 EET