Turn Photos into 3d Models thanks to David McKinnon

David McKinnon, a researcher from Queensland University of Technology, has developed a software tool called 3DSee that can take a collection of ordinary 2D photographs and process them into a 3D model with surprising accuracy.

Dr McKinnon said the software automatically locates and tracks common points between the images allowing a determination of where the cameras were when the photos were taken. This information is then used to create a 3D model from the images using graphics cards to massively accelerate the computations.

A nice application of GPGPU computing.  However, not just any images will do.  According to Dr McKinnon, it requires 5-15 images, each overlapping by a minimum of 80%.  Essentially, it sounds like he needs video slowly panning around the object.

If the accuracy is high enough, I can envision this replacing (or supplementing) alot of 3D Scanning technology used by the graphics and mechanical engineering community.

See your photos in 3D on new website.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.