Integration of range and image sensing for photo-realistic 3D modeling

The automated extraction of photo-realistic 3D models of the world that can be used in applications such as virtual reality, tele-presence, digital cinematography and urban planning, is the focus of this paper. The combination of range (dense depth estimates) and image sensing (color information) provides data-sets which allow us to create photo-realistic models of high quality. The challenges are the simplification of the 3D data set, the extraction of meaningful features in both the range and 2D images and the fusion of those data-sets using the extracted features. We address all these challenges and provide results on data we gathered in outdoor scenes by a range and image sensor based on a mobile robot. Our ultimate goal is an autonomous 3D model creation system which minimizes the amount of human interaction.