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Stanford's New Website Converts Your Photos to 3D

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon Jan 28, 2008 04:46 PM
from the please-be-kind-to-their-servers dept.
Graphics Software
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Stanford has a new website that not only shows you how cool their new 3-d modeling system is, but actually allows you to give it a try with your own photos. The system can take a 2-d still image and estimate a detailed 3-d structure which you can navigate. "For each small homogeneous patch in the image, we use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to infer a set of "plane parameters" that capture both the 3-d location and 3-d orientation of the patch. The MRF, trained via supervised learning, models both image depth cues as well as the relationships between different parts of the image. Other than assuming that the environment is made up of a number of small planes, our model makes no explicit assumptions about the structure of the scene; this enables the algorithm to capture much more detailed 3-d structure than does prior art (such as Saxena et al., 2005, Delage et al., 2005, and Hoiem et el., 2005), and also give a much richer experience in the 3-d flythroughs created using image-based rendering, even for scenes with significant non-vertical structure."
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  • Slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)

    by d3ac0n (715594) on Monday January 28 2008, @04:53PM (#22213652)
    Aaaaaand it's already slashdotted.

    Wow. That was fast.

  • Games? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by webword (82711) on Monday January 28 2008, @04:54PM (#22213670) Homepage
    Wow, can you imagine how cool this would be with respect to video games? Drop in some photos, crank up the customized first person shooter, and zoooom! You could even take photos or shots from movies and do the same thing (e.g., using Star Wars stills).

    • Re:Games? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Stripe7 (571267) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:25PM (#22214096)
      About 20 years ago when they colorized Casablanca an office mate of mine was complaining about their ruining a perfectly good movie. I told him that he would be complaining even more when they used technology to make it in 3D. Seems that won't be too far away any more.

    • Re:Games? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by _KiTA_ (241027) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:33PM (#22214196) Homepage

      Wow, can you imagine how cool this would be with respect to video games? Drop in some photos, crank up the customized first person shooter, and zoooom! You could even take photos or shots from movies and do the same thing (e.g., using Star Wars stills).


      There can be NO END to the verys to describe how much of a very, very, VERY bad idea making a CounterStrike map of your school/mall/town/etc would be.

      • While the above comment may have been flagged as "Funny," I must say that there's something to what he says... I'm too lazy to dig up the specific articles, but folks have gotten in trouble in the past for doing just that (generally their school).

        • Re:Games? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Toonol (1057698) on Monday January 28 2008, @08:02PM (#22216176)
          I bet that the majority of schools in the nation have been converted to first-person shooter maps already. I know every school in my town had been, and that was back during the Quake/Duke Nukem days.

          But don't tell the media that.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by argent (18001)
        Right, convert it into a set of sculpties in SL instead, and add prim parodies of neighbors that bug you.

      • Re:Games? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Scrameustache (459504) on Monday January 28 2008, @11:48PM (#22217962) Homepage Journal


        Wow, can you imagine how cool this would be with respect to video games? Drop in some photos, crank up the customized first person shooter, and zoooom! You could even take photos or shots from movies and do the same thing (e.g., using Star Wars stills).


        There can be NO END to the verys to describe how much of a very, very, VERY bad idea making a CounterStrike map of your school/mall/town/etc would be.
        The crazy old men from florida have won :(
  • Could this type of technology be used for robots to allow them to identify what the 3d layout of the world around them is? Seems like a pretty powerful tool in that area.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by grub (11606)

      Could this type of technology be used for robots to allow them to identify what the 3d layout of the world around them is?

      Some (most?) robots already use dual cameras for true depth perception.

      • The problem is that binocular vision get's less accurate at longer distances. Also, for whatever reason, the robot might not be able to use two "eyes". Either way, another method of approximating distance would come in useful for anything that gets a lot of every day use.

        • radar? lidar? either are superior (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          granted, radar doesn't work so great for transparent surfaces to get the depth cue from -behind- that surface, while lidar gets a little iffy if it's -too- transparent to get the depth cue of that very surface. Combination of both - voila.

          • Re:radar? lidar? either are superior (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Hays (409837) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:46PM (#22214454)
            Radar and Lidar are good for some applications, but they're fundamentally quite different. They're both active sensing technologies- they send out energy in part of the electromagnetic spectrum and then look in that narrow range of the spectrum and see what bounces back. This means that you have trouble seeing things farther away since you'd have to throw more and more energy to keep your samples uniformly bright or uniformly spaced. And it means your power requirements are much higher.

            I think the most interesting part of computer vision is that which deals with passive sensing, such as this work. It senses the electromagnetic radiation that comes from our sun, or moon, or man-made sources. By using the same spectrum that our eyes use it should be able to get a qualitative understanding of the world similar to what humans can achieve.

            Also, as humans we've built the world to be visually interpreted at the EM frequencies that we sense. This means our signs are readable in those frequencies, our indoor lighting works in those frequencies, etc... By sensing in those frequencies you make sure you don't miss anything that humans can see.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by uglyduckling (103926)
          I can think of a very good use for this: laparoscopic "keyhole" surgery. One of the difficult things about that sort of operation is depth perception: until you've tried to do it, it isn't at all obvious just how difficult it can be to get a 5mm scissor blade over e.g. a blood vessel at the right angle. If a computer could analyse the image and add some depth perception cues it could really speed up the surgery and make a difference when something's going wrong and needs to be sorted out fast.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by disckitty (681847)
      Judging from the google cached pages, it looks like that's precisely what his research is for. Google cached pages: here [64.233.169.104], and here [64.233.169.104], and here [64.233.169.104]
    • yeah, if you wanted your robot's 3-d system to suck

      much cheaper and faster to use stereoscopic vision

  • For those that can't get in (Score:5, Funny)

    by eclectro (227083) on Monday January 28 2008, @04:57PM (#22213722)
    I tried it - it converts your face into a Mars flyby.

  • Blade Runner anyone? (Score:5, Funny)

    by virgil_disgr4ce (909068) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:00PM (#22213776) Homepage
    Dammit, and all this time I've been decrying the impossible magical 3-d photo processing in Blade Runner! Curse my skepticism!

    --Tedb0t

  • Photosynth (Score:4, Informative)

    by blankinthefill (665181) <blachanc@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Monday January 28 2008, @05:11PM (#22213920) Journal
    While I know you're all Microsoft haters, bear with me for a minute. This sounds a lot like this Photosynth [youtube.com] demonstration. The relevant part of the video starts at about 3:50, but the whole video is really interesting and I would suggest watching it.

    • Re:Photosynth (Score:5, Informative)

      by nguy (1207026) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:22PM (#22214066)
      Photosynth takes multiple shots, this apparently takes a single shot. And although Photosynth is some nice engineering, (1) it wasn't all developed at Microsoft, and (2) it relies on decades of research work done elsewhere.

      Microsoft does invest a lot of money in research. But what they are spending pales in comparison to all the work by other people that they are building on.
    • It's a myth that the majority of Slashdotters are Microsoft haters. Maybe it just used to be that way.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by pcgabe (712924)
      Photosynth doesn't make anything 3D. It combines flat photos, and while you can move around and see photos attached at different angles, each of those views MUST be a photo on its own. The more pictures you add, the more angles you can look at, but Photosynth isn't making anything 3D.

      These two packages are quite, QUITE different.

  • Google's next toy (Score:4, Funny)

    by pauldy (100083) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:14PM (#22213964) Homepage
    This would be sweet if they took all the imagery from google maps/streets and build out little virtual cities with no headed pedestrians and 5 legged dogs.

    • little virtual cities with no headed pedestrians and 5 legged dogs.
      Why just 5 dogs? Or would there be a lot of non-legged dogs as well? Quite frankly, I'm finding this quadruple amputee dog idea kind of disturbing. I need to go lie down....

  • Not so new (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dfunked (1049576) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:18PM (#22214022)
    Several years ago I worked at a german university where recognizing of human faces was researched. We also did 3D reconstruction of faces, which was useful for training some algorithms. Although the technique is very different, 3D reconstruction from 2D images is not that new. Some examples can still be seen here: link [archive.org]

    • 3D reconstruction from 2D images is not that new
      That technology is of course superseded by 1D-to-3D reconstruction

      Sorry, couldn't resist... uh-oh there goes my karma!
    • Warning, link partly hangs my Firefox (works okay in Opera). There are probably some finer details as to when it does/doesn't have issues.

  • Example input/output, anyone? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kozz (7764) on Monday January 28 2008, @05:29PM (#22214140) Homepage
    Since both the processing engine and the article are hosted on the same server, I can't even read about it. Anyone got a mirror to some sample input/output?

    (No goatse renderings, please)

  • A bit more DYI [acvt.com.au] but cool.

  • seems limited (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2008, @05:45PM (#22214430)

    Other than assuming that the environment is made up of a number of small planes, our model makes no explicit assumptions about the structure of the scene;

    Darn. My photos tend to be mostly of helicopters and boats.

    • Inside Story (Score:5, Funny)

      by jd (1658) <[moc.oohay] [ta] [kapimi]> on Monday January 28 2008, @05:07PM (#22213862) Homepage Journal
      • "What do you mean, you can't give a demo to the President?"
      • "Errr, we posted the link to Slashdot and the network melted."
      • "And what's this requisition order for a 24 gigabit campus network?"
      • "We need the extra bandwidth."
      • "And if I don't approve it?"
      • "We post a link to your cat's facebook page."
      • "Nooooooooooooooooooooo!"

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