Laser-Scanning U.S. Landmarks

MeanMF writes "The New York Daily News reports in this article that the National Park Service is creating detailed 3-D maps of national monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore using high-resolution laser scanners. Their goal is to create highly-accurate blueprints that can be used to reconstruct the monuments if they are damaged by a terrorist attack or other means." The same story is also available at Yahoo!.

Terroism = more funding for this project

[release7]

I read about this project in the NYT a while back even before the WTC attack. So this project was under way before 9/11/01. As evidenced by this link, [sds3dscan.com] they are using the terrorist attacks to seek more funding for the project. For those without Acrobat Reader, the article says, 'The event [9/11] has raised the significance of the project. "There was dedication before but now the sense is there will be more funding."'

So the project wasn't started as a direct result of the attacks as this headline would lead you to believe.

Re:Laser Scanning a Comfort?

[jwcollins]

I think you're overestimating the cost of this technology. I worked for the company that manufactures this laser scanner (Cyra Technologies, www.cyra.com [cyra.com]) from 1998 to 2000. Now, mind you, I was an electronics engineer, not one of the modelers that do the scans and manipulate the data sets. But I'll nonetheless provide some guesstimates.

For something like the Statue of Liberty that's not overly big and that you can scan from the ground, 1 or 2 people could probably do the ~10-20 scans it would probably need in about a day. All you would need to do would be to rope off the area immediately around the scanner (ie. no need to close the Statue of Liberty while they're doing it). A Cyrax 2500 I believe sells for the order of ~100 US kilobucks. Rental on it for a day or two, you can estimate as well as I can.

As for computing power to process the scans, all you need is Cyra's software running on a high end PC. For something like the Statue of Liberty, say 10-20 scans, simple stitching together, you're talking one skilled modeler working on it for maybe a day. Definitely not more than 1 person-week. I won't claim that all US landmarks would be this straightforward to scan, but this technology is very fast, very accurate, and cheap to use. Using old fashioned techniques (ie. photogrammetry), yes, this would cost a fortune. Photogrammetry would require scaffolding, closing the site, cutting and pasting photos, etc.

I remember

[0x0d0a]

After the French got together the money to build the Statue to gift us with and built it, they couldn't convince us to pony up the money to actually have the damn thing shipped over. It took Hearst and a bunch of media work to get enough people to pay for the transportation.

Re:Renting Laser Scanners?

[jwcollins]

These things cost on the order of USD$100k for the hardware, more for the modeling software.

And these have been used in several movies. If you remember Starship Troopers from several years ago, the ending scene with the 2 humans captured in a cave with about a zillion "bugs". The initial Cyrax prototype system was used to scan and model the cave (a real life set made from styrofoam). With the computer model of the meatspace cave, the computer animators could add the bugs and not have them hanging in mid-air or their legs halfway buried in the floor, etc.

A 1st generation Cyrax (model 2400) was used to model the sharks in Deep Blue Sea. It was also used for the climax scene in some circa 1999 Arnold movie, whose title escapes me. There were several other movie uses that also escape me. Some disney/Robin Williams flick I think.

How do I know? I used to work for Cyra Technologies (www.cyra.com [cyra.com]) from Aug 1998 to Apr 2000.

Cyra and several surveying companies that own Cyraxes (cyraxen?) do rent them out and rent out operators and modelers. Cyra and possibly others also provide training to cyrax customers.

As for the obligatory linux question, I'm sorry to disappoint you. The Cyrax 2500 runs a real time OS from ATI (no, not that ATI) called Nucleus [atinucleus.com] on an embedded PowerPC processor. (Note: website appears to be down right now). There are other embedded processors also in the system. How do I know? I designed the initial versions of 3 circuit boards boards and 2 FPGAs for the Cyrax 2500. The PC-side modeling software runs under windoze NT (probably now 2K/XP--dunno; I left in 2000). The modeling software was originally prototyped on SGI boxes under opengl. It was ported to windoze before the first commercial release of a Cyrax.

All hope is not lost, however. One of the hats I wore while working there was linux sysadmin. We had 3 linux servers to run e-mail, web, and file servers for the firmware engineering and manufacturing groups. I don't know if this setup still exists after Cyra was bought by Leica Geosystems in early 2001.