2-D photos spring to 3-D life
You鈥檙e interested in purchasing a car you鈥檝e seen on the web. It鈥檚 the right make, model and vintage. It seems to be in great shape, and it鈥檚 just the right color. The price seems reasonable. So what鈥檚 the problem?
The problem, of course, is what鈥檚 on the side away from the camera. Is it just as pristine, or is it a mess of door dings with an unmatched fender?
The solution is simple. Spin the image around on your PC screen and take a look.
Sound impossible? That鈥檚 because you haven鈥檛 seen the D.C. TechFair 2011 demo 3-D Scanning with a Regular Camera. Demonstrated today by Sudipta Sinha, a researcher who helped devise the project with his Interactive Visual Media colleagues Johannes Kopf, Rick Szeliski, Eric Stollnitz, and Matt Uyttendaele at Microsoft Research Redmond, the research project enables the creation of a 3-D image from a modest collection of ordinary photographs, the kind commonly acquired these days by anybody with a point-and-shoot camera or a mobile phone.
鈥淪uppose you see something interesting and you want to capture different views of an object from different angles,鈥� Sinha says. 鈥淵ou take these pictures from different viewpoints, send them to our system, and it automatically figures out a 3-D model by measuring the 3-D depth behind the pixels in the images. Once you have that, you can interactively, seamlessly change the view from one camera location to another, and this allows the object to be viewed interactively in 3-D.鈥�
Once you have that, your prospective car seller can mark this one sold.
Sinha shows just such a demo, constructed from a mere 48 photos. Some people click off that many in minutes. The photos get transferred to a PC and uploaded to the cloud. A processing pipeline then matches similar images and learns how the camera moved in 3-D, enabling the creation of a depth map, not dissimilar from the depth data provided by the Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor.
The depth data gets stored, in a compact format, and is then viewable on virtually any screen you prefer: phone, laptop, desktop鈥攜ou name it. Standard computer-graphics technology enables the viewing. It could even run inside a browser as a Silverlight app.
The potential for such technology seems endless. Yes, e-commerce and retail scenarios seem immediately obvious, but uses in tourism or education aren鈥檛 far behind.
As Sinha says, 鈥淭his is an enabling technology that makes lots of applications possible.鈥�
Admit it: You want this already, don鈥檛 you?
Provided by Microsoft Corporation
