Acquiring Complete and Editable Outdoor Models from Video and Images

Imagine being able to take a camera out of doors and use it to capture 3D models of the world around you. The landscape at large, including valleys and hills replete with trees, rivers, waterfalls, fields of grass, clouds; seasides with waves rolling onto shore here and crashing onto rocks over there; urban environments complete with incidentals such as lamposts, balconies, and the detritus of modern life. Imagine models that look and move like the real thing. Models that you can use with to make up new scenes of your own, which you can control as you please, and render in how you like. You can zoom into to see details, and out to get a wide impression.

This is an impressive vision, and one that is well beyond current know-how. Our plan is to take a major step towards meeting this vision. We will enable users to use video and images to capture large scale scenes of selected types and populate them with models trees, fountains, street furniture and such like, again carefully selecting the types of objects. We will provide software that recognises the sort of environment the camera is in, and objects in that environment, so that 3D moving models can be automatically created.

This will prove very useful to our intended user group, which is the creative industries in the UK: films, games, broadcast. Modelling outdoor scenes is expensive and time consuming, and the industry recognises that video and images are excellent sources for making models they can use. To help them further we will develop software that makes use of their current practice of acquiring survey shots of scenes, so that all data is used at many levels of detail. Finally we will wrap all of our developments into a single system that shows the acquisition, editing and control of complete outdoor environments is one step closer.

The impact of our work is likely to be significant both academically and industrially. Indeed, we hope to place UK PLC in a world
leading position with respect to model acquisition in outdoor environments.

TO make academic impact we will publish in high quality forums (eg. ICCV, SIGGRAPH) we will organise workshops, two domestically and one internationally. One domestic workshop will be run with the help of the British Machine Vision Association as part of their one-day seminar series, the other via the London Graphics Seminar series which is well attended by both academia and the creative industries. Internationally, we will organise a workshop at a major conference such as Eurographics or ICCV.

Our industrial and communication impact plan has three main parts:
(1) Engage in research of the highest academic quality, yet ensure output are useful to industry; we have convened an
Industrial Advisory Panel (IAP) for this.
(2) Transfer this research into the industry, via the Engineering Doctoral (Eng.D.) centres.
(3) Disseminate our work to the general public as widely as possible.

The IAP keeps our research industrially relevant, without compromising academic integrity. One role of the IAP is to suggest classes of landscape, phenomena of interest and such like, which helps us in selecting which scenes and scene elements to target for model acquisition. A second role is to advise us on industry practice regarding current acquisition via cameras, and modelling needs in terms of editing requirements etc. A third role is to keep us abreast of innovations in industry. The IAP comprises BBC, Disney, Crytec, Gobo Games, EA, Double Negative, and The Foundry, which represents a cross section of the UK's world-class creative sector.

Each academic partner has direct access to an Eng.D. centre: the Centre for Digital Entertainment and Bath, and the Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualization centre at UCL. Both Eng.D. centres are focussed upon placing doctoral level students into the creative industries, jointly supervised by an academic and an industrial researcher. This makes them the ideal vehicle by which to transfer our IP. We already have working relationships will all IAP members through these Eng.D. centres.

Dissemination to the wider public is important. It helps science in general, and the EPSRC in particular, maintain a relationship with the tax payer. We are luck in that our work is visual in nature and therefore easily accessible at a consumer level - indeed our previous work has enjoyed media reportage on a world wide basis on websites, newpapers, radio and TV. This has resulted in many enquiries from industry and from fellow academics. We will continue to produce show-reels, maintain web-sites and make press releases. In addition we will speak about our work at public meeting, such as Bath Camp.