Archive for research

The Ethics of Digital Capture

The Ethics of Digital Capture

Paper (PDF) I wrote the text for this paper in response to my experiences on residency in Western Australia talking to various stakeholders in cultural heritage: uni archaeologists (UWA), a mining-company archaeologist (Rio Tinto), consultant archaeologists, and Indigenous rangers.   It explores the complicated politics…

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PhotoScan Unity 3D scripts and app

PhotoScan Unity 3D scripts and app

Sign up for email updates when things happen on this.  I’ll let you know when the app is released and scripts and tutorials are published. [yks-mailchimp-list id=”941dfeaedd” submit_text=”Submit”] Goals: Apple IOS version of the app. Scripts published, accompanied by  Future: Android version of the app.

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Archaeology Seminar: Making 3D site scans, and making them portable

Archaeology Seminar: Making 3D site scans, and making them portable

Photogrammetry is a method for generating 3D models from images. It can produce fantastic results – models that can appear near photorealistic – and capture not only rock faces and their markings, but fine 3D details and the scale of the site. Recent use of…

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Experimenting with LED lighting for 3D reconstruction

Experimenting with LED lighting for 3D reconstruction

  Lighting outside of studio conditions can be tricky, especially when shooting something in motion or without a tripod where you don’t have exposure time as an option for getting more light into the camera.  The sort of 3D-reconstruction-from-images I work with needs hundreds of source photos, and this…

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Scanning the World in 3D

  In a similar vein to the image-matching against point-clouds that was demonstrated in the Bing Maps TED talk, PhotoCity is aiming to progressively construct a 3D scan of the world. To this end they have released a free iPhone app that displays current scans,…

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Converting PhotoSynths to Dense Point-Clouds

I’ve discussed (with examples of a reconstruction from Newcastle) some of the technologies for doing 3D reconstruction. PhotoSynth is by far the easiest way to get into this, but it is not as powerful as some other options. For example, PMVS2 allows you to reconstruct…

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In-game rough mesh of Newcastle reconstruction

A few weeks ago I posted the point-cloud reconstruction of an event in Newcastle, Australia, created from photos. My research colleague Jules Cromarty has meshed the point-cloud and brought it into the computer game Crysis. Here are the results:         This is…

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Dense point-cloud reconstruction

I have been working with Bundler and PMVS2 to reconstruct some of my old multi-camera scans from 2007. There is a lot of potential to get some really good output from them, but at the moment I’m getting incomplete results; only one side comes out….

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How to Build Cities from Tourist Photos

My research colleague Vinh Nguyen sent me this video of Washington University’s latest image-based reconstruction project (via a New Scientist article “Entire cities recreated from Flickr photos”).     The video shows reconstructed mesh models of the city of Rome. The meshes were constructed using…

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3D scanning with a webcam

Qi Pan, a 3rd year PhD student at Cambridge University Engineering Department, has developed a system for on-line (constructed in real-time) webcam based reconstruction of textured 3D models. The video shows off the potential for this best: Even better news is that a demo may…

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