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
- video editing
- architectural / urban modelling
- modeling for virtual environments.
