Software Converts 2D Images To 3D 152
eldavojohn writes "Dr. David McKinnon from Queensland University of Technology, has recently launched a site that turns your sets of 2D images into 3D bump maps by way of 8 years of his research. The catch is that you need to have between five and fifteen photos of your object and they must overlap at least 80 to 90 percent. So with a video of an object, one might be able to extract every nth frame and use this site to generate a 3D model. Doctor McKinnon said, 'The full version of this software would be great for realistic learning simulators and training software, where you want everything to look like the real thing. This technology could also be great for museums wishing to turn their display objects into 3D images that can be viewed online. We are even looking into making 3D models of cows to save farmers spending thousands of dollars transporting their cattle vast distances to auction sites, allowing for an eBay style auction website for cattle. Films, animations and computer games could also benefit, since 3D film making is taking over from the traditional 2D method of filmmaking. Another application is allowing people to create 3D models of their own face to use on their avatar in computer games or 3D social networking sites such as Second Life or Sony's Home.' Physorg has more details."
How much of the image is real? (Score:3, Interesting)
between five and fifteen photos of your object and they must overlap at least 80 to 90 percent.
So the 3D object in question will only have a front side? That's nowhere near enough for all sides.
Re:How much of the image is real? (Score:4, Informative)
So the 3D object in question will only have a front side? That's nowhere near enough for all sides.
It creates a bump map, not a 3D model. Think of a brick wall in a video game. This is simply a texture image stamped on to a rectangle, but newer games use bump maps to make the bricks stick out. This generates that bump map for you.
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Actually it does create a 3D model. The summary is a bit misleading. I went straight to the website, hoping to get in before the slashdot, and examined some of the results. After the photos are processed a 3D model is built and the bump map is generated off of that. You can also download the model separately as a .ply file.
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Try using a displacement map to do a face and you'll notice that the nostrils are totally fudged up.
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A bump map is a height field, not a full 3D map. A bump map just describes heights of various places along the texture map, and never more.
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If you can generate this sort of bump map for each of the 6 sides (think a cube) you should be able to generate an actual mesh. At least you'll have the precise 3D location for each pixel, shouldn't be too difficult to create a mesh from that.
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No. The pictures do not have to overlap with all pictures on the same 80 to 90 percent of the image. Which means you can just record a film of a object turning around, creating a 180 3D "ring". Then do it vertically (eg with some more rings), and you get the complete model.
Think of it like creating a QuicktimeVR view, stitched together out of many images, just from the outside instead of from the inside.
I wonder if this software will work for "inside" views too. At least in theory, it should.
The first thing
8 years for cattle modeling? (Score:2)
We are even looking into making 3D models of cows to save farmers spending thousands of dollars transporting their cattle vast distances to auction sites, allowing for an eBay style auction website for cattle.
-So... you spent the last 8 years of your life to develop a 3D generator so that one day you may help farmers model their cows instead of spending thousands(!!!) of dollars on transfering them for auction?
-Yes.
-OK, just checking.
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Not to mention the fact that cattle buyers (like my former stepdad in Oklahoma) seldom if ever need to see a three-dimensional model of a cow before deciding whether to purchase it. They already KNOW what a cow looks like in three dimensions. A grainy video of cattle grazing in a field is more than enough -- and *that* technology has been around since the early 1980s (and has led to the demise of most small-town cattle auctions).
Anyone who proposes an "eBay for Cows" has never been involved in real-world
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Pictures are fine, but they can't be substituted for driving it and feeling how it rides, weird noises and so forth.
I know it's an analogy, but I can't help feeling deeply disturbed.
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Personally, I'm about thinking of launching a cow airbrushing service website.
Ummm... Oops. Whoever read that above sentence needs to sign an NDA.
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I've found cows do ok with burns and dodges in the darkroom, but they can't airbrush worth a damn
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Why bother (Score:3, Funny)
Only if it makes the math easier (Score:2)
Favorite quote from my Mechanical Systems professor. I was surprised how much ME's use that in the real world.
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Cows are spherical, as every mathematician knows.
And every physicist will tell you that a cow can be reasonably approximated as a point mass.
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Actually, they're toroidal, just like us. :)
That's one of the reasons why we couldn't live in a 2D world : our digestive tract would cut us in halves.
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Damnit! I always thought cows were tauroidal...
Cows are fractal . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
. . . http://www.mndl.hu/works/fractalcow [www.mndl.hu]
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It boggles the mind that someone would create something awesome like that and then not release it at desktop (or at least high) resolutions.
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Re:Why bother (Score:4, Informative)
Any biologist will tell you: the digestive tract is external (there's never any form of membrane that has to be passed to get from one end to the other). I'd suggest that makes cows a torus.
Mmmm.... Having gone from cows' rectums to a torus, who's up for donuts this morning?
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Mmmm.... Having gone from cows' rectums to a torus, who's up for donuts this morning?
Many doughnuts are made with beef tallow, so you're not far off.
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Nah, that's a bull.
Re:Why bother (Score:5, Funny)
Every mathematician knows you can't get a 3D view from a 2D one. Like the old joke says ...
Three long-time friends meet up in Scotland. One is a biologist, one's a physicist, and one's a mathematician. As they're driving away from the airport into the Scottish countryside, they see a brown cow off in the distance.
The biologist says, "Wow, that's amazing! All the cows in Scotland are brown!"
The physicist replies, "No, all we really know is that some cows in Scotland are brown."
The mathematician replies, "No, all we really know is: there is at least one cow in Scotland, and this side is brown."
Thanks to you... (Score:1, Funny)
...I now know that Chocolate milk is imported from Scotland. Thanks for the enlightenment. :D
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I thought it was Irn Bru that was imported from Scotland, and that it was made of girders.
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The mathematician replies, "No, all we really know is: there is at least one cow in Scotland, and this side is brown."
I grok that we'll make a Fair Witness [wikipedia.org] of him yet!
Speaking of 2D views... (Score:2)
What if the cow was cardboard?
Not normal maps? (Score:2)
Bump maps are so 20th century.
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If you have a height map, use its gradient to compute the normal vector at each point on the surface. There's your normal map.
That would seem somewhat akin to converting to a PNG from a JPG; the resulting normal map is less precise and of lower resolution than one you would derive from the original data.
Anyone care to explain (Score:1, Interesting)
Okay, so I'm not as dumb as this post will seem to make me by asking, but for the sake of the uninitiated...
What is a bump map? and how is it significant in relation to photos and 3D?
Re:Anyone care to explain (Score:4, Informative)
Bump mapping [wikipedia.org] is often used to add textures to otherwise flat surfaces. Basically, the bump map is a channel where the intensity of a pixel represents the height (rather than colour) of the pixel.
It's very similar to this toy [shinyshack.com], which I'm sure you've probably seen before. The bump map represents the 3D shape of the object being portrayed. (It does have certain limitations; since each pixel can only have one height, the bump map can't represent surfaces which fold over themselves... e.g. a bump map of your face would look like your face from the angle it was intended to be viewed from, but from other angles you'd notice that the nostrils were solid underneath.)
Once you've generated a bump map, you can use it to render a true 3D surface, calculating the shadows based on the bump map and the position of the light source.
Misleading title (Score:4, Interesting)
Photosynth [photosynth.net] is far more interesting if you're excited by this concept.
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Actually it is the summary that is misleading. The program generates a 3D model first, which can be downloaded as a .ply file. The bump map is made from that.
Microsoft Synth (Score:1)
I assume this is a more fancy version of something like Microsoft PhotoSynth?
Shame it doesn't involve lasers. :-P
So, I know this is probably a well-researched area (Score:1)
But...
I've been doing some side research in computer vision for a month or two in order to solve a problem regarding constructing a fairly accurate 3D model of a cat walking in front of a webcam. I'm totally ignorant about the entire field, so I've been trading ideas with another friend of mine who actually brought up the idea in the first place. Some of the ideas went from some sort of "averaging" between rough 3D sketches of a cat between multiple frames (with some sort of checking to see if they are, i
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Oh, this is simple. If it's moving and ignores you - it's likely to be a cat.
Bonus points if you can project laser dot and move it around. If the object tracts that, it's almost assuredly a cat.
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Hahah, well, yeah. But what if there was a person who did the same exact thing? No, what if there was a person who did the same thing, AND he had a beach ball on top of his head with two ears pasted on top of it?
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Still sounds like a cat to me.
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With a web-camera? My guess, next to impossible. An array? Maybe a chance. A cat is fairly soft and elastic, which makes model based approaches hard. The fur likely has to few identifiable features to provide enough depth information for a 3D-model.
Best chance Structured light [wikipedia.org]. Preferably in the near-infrared spectrum, this can be captured by your web-cam, but doesn't scares the cat.
If I'm not mistaken, your run-of-the-mill projector does (also) emit near-infrared light. Band-pass filter for the camera, low
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Mr Santax (Score:4, Funny)
Umm.. maybe (Score:3)
You take the cow to auction to sell it - to get it off your farm and on to someone else's. The point of the auction is to move the cow. It might be somewhat more efficient to move the cow directly from farmer to farmer, but this intermediate stop at an auction house can't be that big an inconvenience, can it?
It sounds like a solution in search of a problem.
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You wouldn't buy a plane ticket from A to (random location), then (random location) to B-
You obviously don't fly much. Lay-overs suck.
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Sure, it can (especially if the place the cattle end up going is closer to where they came from than the auction house is to either). Probably more importantly, so can actually having and supporting an auction house capable of holding cattle auctions (cattle are large, live animals), even before considering transportation. So that adds
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"It sounds like a solution in search of a problem."
Welcome to the world of academia :)
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Especially if farmer A is selling 10 cows to 10 different sellers, one of which is farmer B who is buying 9 additional cows from 9 other sellers as well. Auctions scale, 3D cow models don't scale. QED
This is Crazybump (Score:2, Interesting)
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...except Crazybump (http://www.crazybump.com/) is faster, funnier, and has more features. Indispensable for 3D shader development.
I wish I had mod points, I would give you a raise!
They have this in DS9 (Score:1)
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What about videos? (Score:2, Interesting)
What happens if we use this for videos (which are just sequences of generally overlapping images)?
If any progress could be made in this department, we could make video game maps by simply recording a factory with a video camera.
dating websites (Score:1, Interesting)
This would be very useful on dating websites where you need to know if the girl has a big ass. They often provide a very vague 2D image of their frontside.
New Gilligan's Island (Score:2)
Now, if only voice reproduction and voice morphing technology was moving at the same pace as video.
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Now, if only voice reproduction and voice morphing technology was moving at the same pace as video.
I've always wondered about that. Sound recording is so much easier than video, you'd think that bringing a dead actor's voice back to life would be a piece of cake compared to their image, but it's not. I guess that's just and example of some things that are a lot harder than they seem at first. (Like predicting the weather)
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Getting closer... (Score:2)
I've always thought it would be cool to have a tool that could take scenes from old movies where the camera was pointing out the window of a car and convert it into a perfect 3-d map.
You could even extract the people and build models from them including movement.
It's kind of the same as when they put all those dots/lines on a person's body to be able to model the exact movements of the body, just using smarter software instead of dots...
You could gather massive amounts of data from a single shot once a comp
IGES (Score:1)
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Probably they could, but its interface caused me to chew my legs off.
Not impressed (Score:1)
How many time (Score:1)
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Do the Shroud dude! (Score:2, Funny)
If you are really going to try and take your technology mainstream, you may as well go and get a bunch of Shroud of Turin pictures, use your technology to reconstruct Jesus in 3d, and get yourself a guest TV spot on Fox. If your Jesus winds up looking like Peter O'Toole, so much the better!
lame (Score:1)
Putting your face on an avatar is already possible (Score:2)
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Indeed. There are also folks who use 2-d to 3-d technology to produce a 3-d head model of a subject based on 2-d images, rotate the head to the proper perspective, and then render the head at that perspective in order to compare it to a current 2-d image for face recognition.
The tricky part is picking points of correspondence in the images. The overlap requirement in TFA is probably to ease the difficulty of this. Usually, some kind of iterative error minimization is performed over the parameters of an a
Go to Angkor Wat (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm posting this really late in the thread so maybe nobody will read it (or care) but...
If there is one place on earth that is crying out to see this technology used it is the KILOMETERS (really!) worth of intricate stone carvings at Angkor Wat (Cambodia). I've thought about borrowing (stealing?) a friend's $500,000 laser scanner to capture them but the 1) he (his institute really) probably wouldn't let me 2) the thugs who run Cambodia would probably not let me use it without me paying some extortionate amount. There really is no-where else on earth where you can see the results of thousands of man-years of skilled stone carvers. This priceless cultural heritage should be captured before pollutants like acid rain slowly erodes it or thieves literally dynamite it to pieces.
Now perhaps anyone with a good video camera, a steady hand, and a LOT of patience can get this done! Perhaps if this job is too large for any one individual to complete it could be done in sections and the individual video sequences shared over the internet. Anyway, I hope this software is modified to handle video (subject to certain restrictions such as shooting in progressive mode).
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You know what, AC, you're right.
This guy has wasted his life. EMC2, an Ubuntu-based CNC milling program, has a JPG to G-code generator. A company I've worked for did this with some commercial success turning baby handprints and footprints into custom milled embossed plaques.
You take your picture, finesse it, and turn it into a 3D-object. Several CAD programs, such as Rhino and Solidworks, have plugins that do the same thing. There are dozens of programs that do this for various prices.
Even better, they only
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Quite, He either wants geek cred points or is trying to get his PHD with this. If they know this is already out he could loose his grants
'Trying to get his PhD'? (Score:2, Informative)
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He could be an MD.
Hey, this guy should be curing cancer instead of wasting time on 3D pictures!!
Re:VERY, VERY (Score:5, Informative)
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I suppose a 3D image is only true if you can see it in 3D. Since your monitor is 2D, it is in fact a very impressive 3D simulation. If you visit the site, you will see that there are some problems but overall, looks very interesting. Maybe the future of pr0n.
Re:VERY, VERY (Score:4, Insightful)
Even better, they only require ONE image.
In other words, it's not the same problem.
This guy has wasted his life.
Ouch. So if it's not a huge discovery in an entirely new research area, it's worthless? Would you be willing to apply this criterion to your own accomplishments?
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It only requires one post to get karma, right? And once someone has posted and successfully acquired karma legitimately, there's nothing further to be done and all other posts are a waste. :)
Seriously, I agree with you. The AC who started this thread is an idiot.
Re:VERY, VERY (Score:5, Funny)
This guy has wasted his life. ... There are dozens of programs that do this for various prices. Even better, they only require ONE image.
Okay, smart-ass, here's your ONE image. [wikimedia.org]
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It's quite possible to build one, but it only works from one angle.
If you were in the tree (where the girl's left arm is pointing) you'd see something like:
/
\|
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An ASCII picture of a Penrose triangle. Never thought I'd live to see the day. Well done Sir.
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If this software works flawlessly but requires more pictures it's much more important than something theoretical/flawed. If you want a 3D model of something y
Slashdot prior art (Score:2)
You're right, we even read of that on... Slashdot [slashdot.org]!
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"This guy has wasted his life."
Saith the foolish geek posting on Slashdot.
Pot, meet kettle.
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You take your picture, finesse it, and turn it into a 3D-object.
That last bit is the doozy. If any of them reliably generate a 3D model from a single picture with no human interaction, then... well, that's different.
MER does it [Re:VERY, VERY] (Score:2)
When your robot can navigate any foreign environment or your Natal 2 can work without a time-of-flight sensor remember its because of the work on "Structure and Motion" by guys like this (and me).
The Mars Exploration Rovers convert stereo-pair photographs into 3-D terrain models every day, and have been doing this for five years. It's not at all clear what this guy is doing that's new, although I expect if I had the time to drill down through the popularizations to the actual technology, it would be clear.
Now, having a robot that understands what it's seeing, without human input, is much harder.
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Look for Artificial Girl 3. Some folks out there have gone to the trouble of uncensoring it and translating it from the original Japanese so you should have no trouble with it. :)