SFM software - Point cloud alignment

[Ricardo Gaidão]

SFM software like Bundler, PMVS2, CMVS enable to create accurate colored point clouds from digital photos. 

Meshlab can be used to rescale those point clouds and create colored meshes using point color information.

Unfortunately remains the problem of point cloud alignment. 

Nathan M. Craig and Mark Willis developed methods to assign real word coordinates to this point clouds.

The process is something complex and demands many steps.

For majority of archaeologists an automatic point and click solution would be better. 

Maybe some kind of Meshlab plugin, that allow the user to individually select and edit some reference points in the model. Making possible to attribute them real world coordinates.  

Other secondary problem is the lack of a solution to transform the photos used by SFM software into textures to map the models created from those point clouds. 

Ricardo

References:

Structure from Motion Point Clouds to Real World Coordinates (Nathan M. Craig):

http://www.personal.psu.edu/nmc15/blogs/anthspace/2010/02/structure-from-motion-point-clouds-to-real-world-coordinates.html

How to create a Digital Elevation Model from Photosynth point clouds (M. Willis):

http://palentier.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-to-create-digital-elevation-model.html


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Luca said (Sun Dec 5 10:48:23 CET 2010):

Hi all,
It looks like that the issue for ArcheOS 4 are no more so many (more or 
less 10% in the roadmap). On the other hand all the release goals seems 
to be OK:

1 repository (OK)

2 deb packages of archaeological software (OK)

3 adding software of Computer Vision for SFM (Structure From Motion): 
Bundler, PMVS2 (OK, and in the meantime we added also CMVS)

4 adding software for semi-automatic drawing of finds: stippler (OK)

I am thinking that maybe we could choose a date to release ArcheOS 4 
alpha. In this way we can concentrate on the final issue, release the 
distro and fix all the minor bug later (also looking the issue of the 
user/tester).
E.g. new paclages can be added to the repository in a second time, new 
artwork can be uploaded in the wiki with the instruction for the user 
(how to change the wallpaper, etc...).
Anyway, after a while we can release a beta with all the bugs fixed, 
till the final release.

What do you think about it?