I am surrounded by like minds at CVPR, but they work in a wide range of fields. A couple of the people I talked to are involved in space or aerial imaging and with multi modal microscopic imaging. The people involved in what we would consider normal imaging all agree and see the value of…
The Steuart Systems photorealistic 3D scanner uses hardware & software to produce 3D models, but how good is our software? We used the ETH 3D benchmark to evaluate it. We were hoping to be in the top 10% of the 116 entries from around the world, and the March 31 2022 benchmark result put us at #1….
Garbage in Garbage out It is amazing that 3D models can be created from regular (uncalibrated) pictures. This link shows some nice examples of how uncalibrated images can be used to make 3D models. Quality in Quality out Our approach is harder, but our results are better. We precisely calibrate our cameras, and we use…
Here is an example of our latest results after a few more weeks of tuning the noise reduction controls. Now that most artifacts and distortion are sufficiently reduced, we will begin merging scans to produce larger models.
We have steadily improved our scanning results over the last 6 weeks by modifying hardware, writing new software, and tuning over a dozen variables. The video below demonstrates the effect of our enhanced noise reduction: Low noise in 3D models is important for two reasons: Low noise 3D looks better. Low noise 3D models…
Here is an early 3D scan from our latest prototype scanner. EARLY is a key word here, because our scanner has only been operational for a couple of weeks. During the last year my team has completely upgraded the scanner hardware including cameras, lenses, chassis, and calibration tools. We have also ported our software from…
This year’s enhancements to the image processing routines in our stereo scanning software has improved processing speed and 3D model accuracy. Comparisons between our current results and those from 9 months ago show that we have reduced the magnitude of one type of geometric error in our 3D scans by a factor of 2 to…
This post compares our latest 3D results with results from November 2012 (3 months ago). Our 3D models are generated by processing pairs of 2D images, and the same 2D images that were processed in the November post have been processed again. The only difference between the two 3D models is that new version was…
We spent the summer of 2012 enhancing our 3D scanner. The 3D scan below with 3.5 million points shows that the system can now produce high-resolution 3D models. Some improvement was the result of integrating code from the open source projects Point Cloud Library & OpenCV, but the largest improvement came from camera recalibration. Why…
Making 3D models is time consuming. Recent programs like Google’s SketchUp (it’s free) have simplified the process of making digital 3D models, but SketchUp is definitely not automatic. To make a 3D model look photorealistic, real world pictures can be “projected” onto a SketchUp model. While this technique can add realism, SketchUp is still a…