Rebuild the Earth in 3D from imagery. Automatically.

THE NEED

The Earth is not flat, and if someone requires accurate measurement or modeling of the Earth, they need a 3D repreentation of that part of the Earth.  Current methods include surveying, laser imaging (lidar), and radar imaging (sar).  All require a great deal of time, potentially expensive equipment, ad expert operators and users. Industries and applicatons that have this requirement include land use planning, emergency management, graphical model development, measurement, surveillance and mapping. 

THE SOLUTION 

TopoMap builds on the legacy of 2d3's BouJou by extending the use of structure from motion technology to track thousands of points in imagery then use those points to reconstruct 3D geometry.

TopoMap reconstructs the 3d model using nothing more than the imagery itself.  TopoMap automatically determine the relationships among all the frames, connects them together, and builds the model without any user input.  In the process, TopoMap also produces an image referred to as a mosaic, which is actually a compilation of images blended into a single image that is used to texture the model.  The result is a 3D model with texture that can be viewed in our proprietary viewer or exported to a variety of 3D formats for use in other software applications.

THE PROCESS

First, TopoMap analyzes the frames of imagery and finds thousands of identifyable points, referred to as features.  The features form the foundation for the model, and ultimately become the vertices of the model.  Because of this, the resolution of your model is only limited by the resolution of the imagery used to build it. 

Second, TopoMap correlates the features across multiple frames of imagery, to determine the movement of the camera over the scene.  By doing this, we are using parallax from multiple images produced by a moving camera to solve the hard problem of estimating the motion of our camera form the imagery.

Third, the resultant motion model and feature points are used to build a 'mesh' or model of the scene.  The points of this mesh, called vertices, are calculated and connected together for use in the next step or they can be exported for use in other software packages.

Fourth, a mosaic image is created by intelligently choosing the most appropriate segments of the input imagery after comparing the geomatry of the mesh and the individual images from the input set.  Each triangle in the mesh is given a image that best suits the geometry of that triangle.  Those images are then combined into an ortho-rectified mosaic and associated with the the 3d model.

Finally, the model can be viewed, manipulated, measured and analyzed in the TopoMap Viewer or exported to another software package.

Optionally, if global potisioning data is available when the images are recorded, TopoMap can take advantage of that data to scale and geo-locate the 3d model to real-world earth coordinates, allowing users to determine the exact latitude and longitude of any point on the 3D model, and measure objects and distances on the model.