An Enhanced On-Line Service for 3D Model Construction from Photographs

Abstract

We present a web service for image based 3D reconstruction. The system allows a cultural heritage professional to easily create a 3D model of a scene or object out of images taken from different viewpoints. The user uploads the images to our server on which all processing takes place, and the final result can be downloaded upon completion. Any consumer-class digital camera can be used, and the system is free to use for non-commercial purposes. The service includes a number of innovations to greatly simplify the process of taking pictures suitable for reconstruction. In particular, we are able to construct models of planar scenes and from photographs shot using a turntable, and at varying zoom levels. Although the first two may seem like particularly simple cases, they cause some mathematical issues with traditional self-calibration techniques. We handle these cases by taking advantage of a new automatic camera calibration method that uses meta-data stored with the images. For fixed-lens camera setups, we can also reuse previously computed calibrations to support otherwise degenerate scenes. Furthermore, we can automatically compute the relative scale and transformation between two reconstructions of the same scene, merging two reconstructions into one. We demonstrate the capabilities of the system by two case studies: turntable reconstruction of various objects and the reconstruction of a cave, with walls and roof integrated into a complete model.