The Computer Science Colloquium

George Wolberg
(City College of New York, CUNY)

"PhotoSketch: A Photo-Centric 3D Modeling Tool"

    Geospatial navigation tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth are exceedingly popular applications for exploring massive datasets. Their explosive growth provides impetus for photorealistic 3D modeling of urban scenes. Although laser range scanners are traditional sources for detailed 3D models of existing structures, the heavyweight models they generate are not appropriate for the streaming data that these navigation applications leverage. Instead, lightweight models as produced by photogrammetry tools are better suited for this domain. Unfortunately, photogrammetry tends to be a very labor-intensive operation, requiring manual camera calibration and tedious modeling processes. This talk presents the virtues of combining computer vision techniques and photogrammetry to simplify the 3D modeling workflow. The contribution of this work is that it merges the benefits of automatic feature extraction, multiview geometry, an intuitive sketching interface, and dynamic texture mapping to produce lightweight photorealistic 3D models of buildings. We present results from experiments in large-scale urban scenes.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.