'Columbia University Libraries/Information Services'
Doi
Abstract
The automated extraction of photorealistic 3-D models of the world that can be used in applications such as virtual reality, tele-presence, digital cinematography and urban planning, is the focus of this paper. The combination of range (dense depth estimates) and image sensing (color information) provides data-sets which allow us to create photorealistic models of high quality. The challenges are the simplification of the 3-D data set, the extraction of meaningful features in both the range and 2-D images and the fusion of those data-sets using the extracted features. We address all these challenges and provide results on data we gathered in outdoor scenes by a range and image sensor based on a mobile robot. Our ultimate goal is an autonomous 3-D model creation system which minimizes the amount of human interaction
