Google Earth Beaten By Autorendering From Photos 176
Flu writes "Sweden's major engineer newspaper NyTeknik writes about a new technology which is used to automatically convert 60.000 aerial photographs of Stockholm, Sweden, into a 3d-world, similar to Google Earth's rendering of major buildings in some US cities. But unlike Google's laser-measured rendering, this technique took less than 8 days (including the photography) to automatically generate the 3D-model of Stockholm — which includes every building and details as high as individual trees!
The program was developed by C3, a subsidiary of the Swedish defense industry company SAAB, together with a PC gaming company called Agency 9. The complete article is available (sorry, Swedish only), but the 3D-rendering of Stockholm is available as a Java applet from the Swedish phone-dictionary service Hitta.se (tick the checkbox — it's an ordinary disclaimer, and click 'Till 3D-kartan')." The technique used gives a cool water-color look to the scenes, too.
Game mods (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft was so close... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Nifty. (Score:3, Interesting)
The story I read was about creating 3D maps from sat pictures, inserting geodata where it was known, and using this as guidance data for unmanned passenger vehicles like the latest DARPA challenge.
Theoretically, if you can update photos every other day, you could use this to map alternate routes for drivers, and correct inconsistencies in map data for Google maps and Yahoo maps et al.
It's all about the speed of updates. I'd think a single helicopter flying with a rather fancy camera setup (something like they use for capturing a murder scene etc.) could cover a metropolitan area in a day, crunch the photo data, update... presto, accurate maps. Even 8 days is pretty damn fast.
slashdotting (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is gonna have quite an effect on their servers
At first I though: *yuch* this is awful with the geometries being at very low resolution and with strong artifacts. But as the script kept processing it's looking really good by now, except that it's still hour-glassing and I can't zoom in after minutes.
Re:Game mods (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:viewing angle (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This just in... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Game mods (Score:3, Interesting)
Real-time geometry calculation (Score:2, Interesting)
That wasy my initial thought, but (having watched it load, but not read the (F) article) now I'm thinking perhaps it's just an incremental load of a height field.
The height-field v. polygon guess is also supported by seeing how bridges are handled - for example, with flat sides that include images of boats striped up them.
Please add "Java" tag to this. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's FAST!!!!
Thank's for posting this! I didn't know Stockholm was so beautiful!
Re:Game mods (Score:4, Interesting)
But also remember, there is a LOT of continuity in cities. Especially on commercial buildings.
The best one I could think of are those huge industrial chillers that commercial institutions have on their roofs for their AC. There aren't a billion models of them, so if you could somehow detect the model of the AC units in one photo you already have a good amount of geometry going for you.
Then you figure out what cars are on the street. A Prius has a specific shape that really doesn't change from Prius to Prius, so you know some of the details about every car on the street.
Manholes are a standard size, if you were to figure out what type of manholes you had in your picture you have more data. How many police boxes and fire hydrants are there in a photo of a NYC block?
If you gave me a super-high-resolution photo of a city block I could find literally hundreds if not thousands of points of reference. Soda bottles and cans... the list goes on
Re:This just in... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, butSweden is cheating themselves by insisting on using inferior local technology.