3-D modeling advance

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a Web service called Make3D that lets users turn a single two-dimensional image of an outdoor scene into an immersive 3-D model. This gives users the ability to easily create a more realistic visual representation of a photo--one that lets viewers fly around the scene.

To convert the still images into 3-D visualizations, Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, and Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science, developed a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. … Larry Davis, a professor and chair of the computer-science department at the University of Maryland, in College Park, says that turning a single image into a 3-D model has been a hard and mathematically complicated problem in computer vision, and that even though Make3D gets things wrong, it often produces remarkable results. … Make3D is not the first site to extract a 3-D model from a single image. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) launched Fotowoosh in May 2007. … CMU's [Alexei] Efros says that the work provides a new perspective on the computer-vision problem and will hopefully result in a deeper understanding of how human vision functions.

Read full story at Technology Review.