3D Camera

[Redrobes]

Theres some great movies on Devebec's site where he took stereo images of a forest path and gets 3D world data out of them. He uses it to interpolate the tweens when moving forward so that as he walks on a path taking a photo every 10 or 20ft he can then make a full frame rate movie of moving down the path.

http://www.debevec.org/Immersion/
http://www.naimark.net/projects/dim.html

Alfar, your right in that you have to compare the two images to get the Z info along the camera lens axis. If you took the photo high up then the two images would essentially be the same so you would not get any appreciable difference enough to get any accurate Z at all.

But suppose you already had a height map which was super low res like the ones you can get free. Say a 100m point sampled one. On the ground that translates into some pretty triangular blocky landscape. From knowing this as a starting point you can then take photos of an area and add extra samples in. Sure you need to take many and you need to known the location from where you took it but from having the rough height map you can use that to correlate the Z info to determine the direction of the camera and use GPS to get the location which some cameras have built in now. So with many, you could get a high res height map of terrain with all the color photos needed to texture it a) from above and b) from the sides too in the cases of trees etc.

Ambitious I would agree.

Where I think I might be most interested in this is for scanning 3D objects using structured light patterns projected onto it.