Making 3D Models from Video Clips

BoingBoing is covering an interesting piece of software called VideoTrace that allows you to easily create 3D models from the images in video clips. "The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modeled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model."

computer vision technology is pretty wild

[jollyreaper]

Remember back in the day when we were told that computers would never be able to learn how to understand human speech because it's too complicated? The arguments were compelling but now we've got voice recognition working over crappy telephone connections and dictation software is getting better all the time. As bad as the voice recognition problem was, computer vision seemed like an even harder nut to crack given how impossible it seemed to get a machine to go from a two-dimensional image to 3D. All of this stuff seems like impossibly difficult "we'll never get there" AI impossibilities and then we see a technology demonstration that nails it. I'm still astounded that DARAPA is not only asking for robot-driven cars, they're actually getting teams producing working results. That's another problem I always thought would be impossible.

My prediction for the future: the 21st century will be for robotics what the 20th was for aviation. We've been thinking about it for centuries but now the technology is maturing to the point that we can really do something with it. The stuff we're amazed by today is going to seem like wood and canvas biplanes.

"True AI"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Add in a 3d physics simulator, and you're halfway to true AI.

I've never heard of "true AI" -- do you mean strong AI [wikipedia.org]?

And no, computer vision plus physics simulation does not make half of strong AI, either. Russell and Norvig, the classic AI text, lists 9 abilities generally required for strong AI. 2 is not half of 9.

I have a quick overview on how to do AI, and as you'll note on the very beginning of the page [geocities.com]: the reason I haven't worked on AI myself is that I can't code a video->3d object converter myself.

I don't know what your dead geocities page has, but not working on AI because you can't write a video->3d object converter is like not working on video compression because you can't act.

Re:Terrible link

[apankrat]

Outside of /. this sort of news "wrapper" articles (BB or not) is considered a blog spam. There is absolutely no reason to link to a wrapper, when it just rehashes what's in the original article and then forwards to it for details (which is what a vast majority of readers would want anyways).

Re:Wake me when...

[pnewhook]

We're a heck of a lot closer with this than without it. This is a huge step in that direction.

Actually our company has had technology more advanced than that described in the article for years. With ours you simply pan the camera around and the model creation is fully automatic - there is no need to trace the image at all.

It's called Instant Scene Modeller and heres a link to a demo of the technology for anyone that's interested: http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2005/54188.php [demo.com]

linking to wrappers is probably good

[someone1234]

It surely mitigates the slashdot effect.