Comment Differences with Photosynth (Score 4, Informative) 87
I was a co-author on this work -- it's great to see it on Slashdot =)
I also worked on the Photo Tourism project (which is related to Photosynth). There's a big difference between Photosynth and this new 3D reconstruction work, in that Photosynth takes a photo collection and reconstructs camera positions and a sparse point cloud (a set of disconnected 3D points floating in space), while in this new work we build *dense* 3D models of scenes (in the form of polygon meshes). Dense models are usually much better for use in applications like computer graphics, since they can be used to render scenes with much more photo-realism.
These two problems require different algorithms to solve---for this dense problem we use a technique called multi-view stereo, but we made it work with images taken by many different people under different conditions.
- Noah
I also worked on the Photo Tourism project (which is related to Photosynth). There's a big difference between Photosynth and this new 3D reconstruction work, in that Photosynth takes a photo collection and reconstructs camera positions and a sparse point cloud (a set of disconnected 3D points floating in space), while in this new work we build *dense* 3D models of scenes (in the form of polygon meshes). Dense models are usually much better for use in applications like computer graphics, since they can be used to render scenes with much more photo-realism.
These two problems require different algorithms to solve---for this dense problem we use a technique called multi-view stereo, but we made it work with images taken by many different people under different conditions.
- Noah
