3D Aerial Photos For the Common Man

An anonymous reader writes "So you have a RC model aircraft snapping digital photos from the air, but how do you organize them all? This cheap cloud service from a European research giant will upload your photos and automatically convert them into 3D models you can navigate like a video game. And if you don't have a model aircraft, they got those on-the-cheap too. Let the overhead droning begin!"

Re:I say it all the time, Vision to 3d world = AI

[EdZ]

I'd reason that wiring up Natural Language when having a large database of objects(nouns) would still be rather difficult, but not as difficult as changing camera feeds into 3d world representation.

With two cameras with a known separation, it's not that hard a problem at all. With one camera and a depth camera (Kinect), it's not hard at all. With one regular camera and a known motion, it's not that hard. With one camera and an unknown motion, it's a bit tricky. Mostof this is covered by Structure From Motion, or occasionally Structured Lighting.

3D data from 2D data is a bit tricky, but nowhere even close to being as hard as software that can understand natural language. Even PARSING natural language is hard enough for most systems. There are far more systems that can map a 3D environment than there are that can correctly recognise and respond to a simple sentence, e.g: "Computer, will it be rainy today?"

Re:The real reason

[CrazyJim1]

If you want to check out my webpage on AI from 2002, you can do so here [goodnewsjim.com]. There is a lot of information there that isn't as concise as I have here. AI is easy to understand conceptually when you think of it as simply a computer program taking in input from the outside world, and interacting with it. The AI I'm talking about has little to no machine learning involved. It is all hard coded AI for robots to take commands and follow them. It really isn't as hard as everyone thinks. I think the trap people fall into is,"I don't know how the brain works, so we can't figure out AI." or "AI is one of those things you need to write a program that programs itself", but if you just approach the problem of,"How do I make a robot go pick up a ball I threw?" you can see that is something that is codable with certain other understandable technologies.

We don't know how to digitize a world and put it into a 3d world yet. But you can see this is a problem that will be solved someday.
We don't know how to program a computer with Natural Language(English). But this is a problem that will be solved someday(especially if you have a database of 3d objects available through digitizing).

Artificial Intelligence isn't really as impossible as people think it is. I'd reason that it could be done with a company/government with money in just 7 years of the technology of digitizing things to a 3rd world. But due to inefficiencies in government/for profit companies, it probably won't happen for 20. And I have no idea how far off digitizing things in a 3rd world is off from now to add onto that.

I could go straight to working on Artificial Intelligence myself, and probably research a digitizer myself(no guarantees I could write it), but Artificial Intelligence research doesn't pay the bills.