Esta tecnología desarrollada en Australia, Videotrace traza, vectoriza, crea modelos 3D de objetos que aparecen en un vídeo.

Aún no está disponible la beta, actualmente está en fase en desarrollo, es sólo un prototipo, buscan patrocinadores, pero si veis este vídeo os daréis cuenta de la potencia y el avance que puede suponer para el mundo 3D:

VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

VideoTrace is a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video»”models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence. The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model. Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.

Applications

There are a number of applications of the VideoTrace technology, including modelling parts of the real world for insertion into virtual worlds. You may want to model your house, in order to put it into Google Earth, or your couch, in order to take it with you into Second Life, for example.

The applications that we’re most interested in right now are

Authors

VideoTrace is the result of a collboration between The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide, and The Oxford Brookes Computer Vision Group. The people behind it are

VideoTrace’s status

VideoTrace is currently at the prototype stage. We’re looking for commercial partners that can develop it to the point whereby we might release it. The first beta test in progress, and we expect to run another in the near future.

If you are interested in this commercial development, or would like to be place on the mailing list so you can be notified of further developments and particularly the release of the final version please email [email protected].

VideoTrace is covered by two patent applications, each of which has been filed both in Australia and the US.

Further directions

We’re currently developing further modelling interactions to increase both the power and flexibility of the modelling process. We’re working on interactive dense reconstruction, organic shapes, de- and re-linghting for model-based video editing, deformable objects and dynamic scenes, amongst other ideas.

We are particularly interested in teaming with groups who have interesting industry-motivated problems to which VideoTrace might be applied. If you are interested in working with us please email [email protected].

Jobs and such

We’re currently advertising for a post-doc to join the team working on VideoTrace, but we’ll be looking for suitably skilled software engineers soon too hopefully. The post-doc is advertised here, and if you’re interested in the programming positions please email [email protected] and we’ll let you know when the positions become available. If you have the right background we’re also looking for PhD students to work on this project and a few related ones. This would require that you have a very good honours degree, or an equivalent qualification (like a relevant Masters for instance). Again, please email [email protected]f if you are interested.

Media

Wer’e getting quite a lot of coverage on all sorts of media. Cyber Shack Radio did a story on VideoTrace, including an interview with Anton van den Hengel. The show is available on their archive. There is also an interview with Anthon on the 3dtest site. The following is a (random) sub-set of the other sites that have featured VideoTrace:

Australian Centre for Visual Technologies | VideoTrace: Rapid interactive scene modelling from video

Videotrace | Tecnología para crear modelos 3D a partir de un vídeo