Prof. George Wolberg

Dept. of Computer Science, City College of New York

The talk will be held on Wednesday 11/12/08 at 4:00-5:00pm in NAC 8/207.

ABSTRACT

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.