Photorealistic Terrain Modeling

Photorealistic terrain model of the Pathfinder landing site

The objective of this project is to provide the operation and science teams of NASA planetary surface missions with improved visualization of their remote worksites. The goal of this research is to provide these teams with a photo-realistic topographic model of their surface mission at downlink rates and deliver the capability to automatically process stereo imagery from the remote ground system into photo-realistic topographical models of the terrain at the remote worksite. These models consist of accurate three dimensional terrain reconstructions registered with their source imagery.

Last Updated:
Oct 2002 by Kurt Schwehr
Modified Oct 2001 - mirrored to schwehr.org
img no longer has a web server.

Email: zbinden@artemis.arc.nasa.gov
or schwehr@cs.stanford.edu

UPDATE: 15-Jun-2004
The Mer mission has been going very well. This software was used to generate 3D models of many stereo pairs during the mission. In addition to the Stereo Pipeline, the Stereo Engine (done at Ames) and depth from focus (Marc Lemmon) were also very successful.

Just found a very extensive tutorial on 3D from images by Marc Pollefeys: Tutorial

-kurt