Journal 15, November 27

Article: Interview with Qi Pan about his Webcam 3D scanner proForma

I think that one of the problems with 3D imaging in the past has been the prohibitive cost of custom 3d cameras. Teh expense of 3D cameras is due to some literally being two cameras sandwiched together and others having an expensive custom lens. Some use multiple independent cameras however I think while that might have some advantages such as you can see all sides of the target the cost and complexity would be even more than for the previously mentioned methods.

Not only is Qi Pan's software able to use a common USB webcam for input but it updates the position and shape of the model in real time once it has been scanned! His project is called proFORMA which stand for Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition. The software works under the assumption that the camera is stationary and that the object of interest is in the center of view.

I think if porFORMA were freely licensed,under the BSD/MIT license for instance , with source code available could become quite a valuable tool for both open source and commercial interests. I think there is the possibility of using it to enhance video compression for video conferencing. Even though it makes the assumption that the camera is stationary I think it may be possible to allow the software to work if the changes in location of the camera were known making it usable for robotics applications.

The article mentioned that one of the drawbacks of the software currently was that the object needed to be sufficiently textured or else the proFORMA would be unable to model it correctly. I think that is probably because it uses the colors of the object as reference points when figuring out the 3D shape.

Qi Pan states that processing power is one of the main things holding back the system from being able to capture much larger models such as entire scenes. I think that could be partially remedied by using a computer with accelerator cards such made by Tilera which can run regular C/C++ code on using Linux as the operating system the advantage is it runs slightly modified but otherwise normal code on 36 to 100 or more cores for vastly increased performance in multithreaded applications.

Another cool possibility is being able to import objects you own into games to further personalize the experience. Perhaps so games no longer have to be entirely a canned experience but can be modified and enhanced by the players. An example of one such game would be Gary's mod I don't think it is actually a game with goals or anything in the conventional sense but fun non the less I think due to it being a giant user content scratchpad of sorts. From generating a model of you favorite teapot to getting a video chat stable on a weak wifi connection I think proFORMA has a lot of possibilities to explore.

Video of perFORMA in action.