Reconstruct 3D Objects using Miscrosoft Photosynth
Previously I wrote about Structure from Motion using Bundler. If you have troubles with these Linux command line tools, you might want to try Microsoft Photosynth. You simply select the images on your hard drive and wait the software to align all cameras, basically the same way Bundler would.
(Ok, first you need to download a piece of software and create a Windows Live ID… But as a brave Linux user you are running such Microsoft programs in a Virtual Box. So it doesn’t do too much harm.)
Visualizing Large 3D Point Clouds using Meshlab
Install Meshlab using aptitude: sudo aptitude install meshlab. Run from command line using meshlab or from the Graphics section of the Ubuntu menu.
Generating Dense Point Clouds using CMVS
Download CMVS and extract it to a directory of your choice, e.g. /usr/local/cmvs. Then in my case I needed to create a symbolic link liblapack.so.3 to liblapack.so within /usr/lib. You can add the CMVS directory to your PATH variable for easier access: export PATH=/usr/local/cmvs/program/main:$PATH.
Structure from Motion using Bundler
- Download Bundler and extract it into a directory (to be referred to as
BASE_PATH). - Download the SIFT Keypoint Detector and extract
sifttoBASE_PATH/bin. - Add
BASE_PATH/libtoLD_LIBRARY_PATH.
Extract Selected Video Frames using FFmpeg
FFmpeg can easily be used to extract single frames from video data, in my case to create input images from an aerial surveillance video for structure from motion reconstruction.
