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Depending on how much us humans contribute, there might not be much left for the bots.
by iansimon 17y ago
Depending on how much us humans contribute, there might not be much left for the bots.
- jrussino 17y agoThe problem that they want to solve is: "How do we create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth? How do we make sure it's accurate, that it stays current and that it's useful to everyone who might want to use it?" I think "stays current" is an important part of the question. Over a period of many years, buildings in an area are taken down and new ones are built. Maybe Google will have an enthusiastic mass of people contributing to this project, and end up with good models of most of the buildings out there right now... but in ten years, are people still going to be doing this for them? I think mooneater's suggestion makes sense if you look at growing this into something big and robust in the long term.
- iansimon 17y agoYes, keeping the model up to date is definitely an important issue. Don't forget that this also involves capturing new aerial imagery periodically. Another approach that may have more potential than automatically extracting 3D structure from aerial imagery is using aerial depth maps from something like LIDAR. There's a research group at USC doing this, and you can see a video describing the process here: http://graphics.usc.edu/~qianyizh/miscs/cvpr09_streaming_full.mov http://graphics.usc.edu/~qianyizh/miscs/cvpr09_streaming_ful...
- iansimon 17y agoAnd here's another video from USC that just shows textured 3D models a few cities, captured using LIDAR and aerial imagery: http://graphics.usc.edu/~luwang/videos/cvpr.avi http://graphics.usc.edu/~luwang/videos/cvpr.avi