Efficient Large Scale Acquisition of Building Interiors

We describe a system for the rapid acquisition of building interiors. In 40 hours, a two member team with a single acquisition device captured a model of the corridors and 20 individual rooms spanning 6 floors of a large building. Our custom acquisition device operates at interactive rates. The system provides immediate feedback to the operator. The operator guides the acquisition device in real time and trivially avoids over sampling the planar parts of the scene such as floors, ceilings, walls, or doors. Most of the acquisition time budget is spent on the parts of the scene with complex geometry. A corridor section is modeled by acquiring a depth enhanced panorama (DEP) at each one of its two ends and by fitting proxy geometry to the two DEPs. A room is acquired with a single DEP and proxy geometry is fitted to the planar parts. A room or a corridor section is acquired in less than 15 minutes. The acquisition device acquires high quality color intrinsically registered with the depth data. The resulting model is a texture-mapped triangle mesh that supports photorealistic interactive rendering and is suitable for applications such as virtual training and simulation