Japanese Researchers Obtain 3D Data More Efficiently from Ordinary Digital Cameras

Here’s an intriguing system from researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology that provides a new way to gather 3D spatial data from photos taken with a regular digital camera.

As you can see in the video below from Diginfo News, the system obtains a 3D-image by using SfM (or Structure from Motion), obtaining depth cues by viewing an object from moving around to view it from different angles.

The camera is equipped with an Eye-Fi card, which automatically sends the photos to a PC for processing, creating a 3D model.

They note that this system is just in the initial stages, so the results still look far from smooth. But there are many exciting possible applications for something like this in modeling or mapping, for example.

I can’t help but wonder what might happen if you combined something like this with Google’s Street View camera. That would be an interesting mash-up, I bet! And what about old photos? I wonder if this sort of technology could obtain 3D info about structures or objects that no longer exist?

Can you think of other applications? Let us know in the comments.