A New Zealand- based company, Areo is building up the September 8 launch of a new 3D scanning service that they claim will be a game changer. It appears that the idea is to use photographs to eliminate the need for expensive and time consuming laser scanners.
This blog post indicates that a customer will upload their photo to a website and within minutes or hours recieve a 3D point cloud from the Aero service. They have also been using the technology to support a similar approach with airborne photography.
It will be interesting to see what happens on Wednesday.
It is not something completely new.
There is a public, FREE, web service active since 2007/2008 called Arc3D, result of an EU project, that allowed to generate three dimensional models from uploaded photos.
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~visit3d/webservice/v2/
Together with the free MeshLab range map processing system, it is widely used in the Cultural Heritage community where standard 3D scanning costs can be a blocking factor.
I described in my last Siggraph Course on CH
http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/~cignoni/CHCourse/
and you can find many examples of its use around…
http://www.personal.psu.edu/nmc15/blogs/anthspace/2010/01/automatic-reconstruction-conduit-arc-3d.html
cheers
Paolo
Interesting. Once again, the passive versus active imaging debate gets a fresh injection. Certainly this will offer an extremely low-cost alternative to capture 3D. However, the user will need to wait for optimal lighting conditions. In practice, this can be very frustrating and time consuming.
I think that it will help force costs down at the low end of data capture where this method is a suitable alternative. But most companies that have selected to deploy 3D laser scanning systems have done so after careful cost/benefit analysis and have realized that timely delivery of information products from the data requires being able to take advantage of all survey opportunities, not just waiting for “optimal” conditions.
Neat technology, but good luck under tree canopy
Sounds cool. However, it is to be seen that what kind of accuracy is delivered. There are several systems based on photo-triangulation but as you move away from camera the accuracy degrades fast. Also, in oblique angles the accuracy is a major concern.
In addition to Arc3D, there is also Microsoft’s photosynth:
http://photosynth.net/
Right now you can see the point cloud in the web interface, however, they are considering making it possible for the user to retrieve the point cloud and making a denser point cloud.
There is open source code available to extract the data stream from photosynth.
Here is a tutorial of the procedure:
http://binarymillenium.com/2008/08/photosynth-export-process-tutorial.html
This goes into more detail about the bin file structure.
http://binarymillenium.com/2008/08/exporting-point-clouds-from-photosynth.html
However, the data does need to be scaled. Also, quality control is always an issue.
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