Acquiring Complete and Editable Outdoor Models from Video and Images

Imagine being able to take a camera out of doors and use it to capture 3D models of the world around you. The landscape at large, including valleys and hills replete with trees, rivers, waterfalls, fields of grass, clouds; seasides with waves rolling onto shore here and crashing onto rocks over there; urban environments complete with incidentals such as lamposts, balconies, and the detritus of modern life. Imagine models that look and move like the real thing. Models that you can use with to make up new scenes of your own, which you can control as you please, and render in how you like. You can zoom into to see details, and out to get a wide impression. This is an impressive vision, and one that is well beyond current know-how. Our plan is to take a major step towards meeting this vision. We will enable users to use video and images to capture large scale scenes of selected types and populate them with models trees, fountains, street furniture and such like, again carefully selecting the types of objects. We will provide software that recognises the sort of environment the camera is in, and objects in that environment, so that 3D moving models can be automatically created. This will prove very useful to our intended user group, which is the creative industries in the UK: films, games, broadcast. Modelling outdoor scenes is expensive and time consuming, and the industry recognises that video and images are excellent sources for making models they can use. To help them further we will develop software that makes use of their current practice of acquiring survey shots of scenes, so that all data is used at many levels of detail. Finally we will wrap all of our developments into a single system that shows the acquisition, editing and control of complete outdoor environments is one step closer.