CAMERA: CAd Modelling of Built Environments from Range Analysis

CAMERA was an EC funded TMR (Trans-Mobility of Researchers) network (ERB FMRX-CT97-0127). The project finished December 31, 2001.

BRIEF PROJECT OVERVIEW

The main objective is to undertake pre-competitive cross-disciplinary research and develop human resources in the field of automated acquisition of architectural CAD models of already built environments. This includes industrial and heritage buildings. The goal is to take range and intensity images of a site and construct a "virtual reality" model of the building.

The main application sectors are expected to be: chemical and nuclear, training, tourist, museum and archeaological, and construction. The main technologies used: 3D range sensors for range image acquisition, surface reconstruction and texture mapping, photogrammetric and uncalibrated reconstruction from intensity images and CAD/geometric shape representation.

This image shows one of the experimental environments that we are attempting to model. The image is from a 12th century round church on Bornholm Island (Danish, off the southern coast of Sweden). The top half of the image shows the brightness of the surfaces, as the scene would appear if we could see only in shades of grey. The bottom image shows the distance from the camera to each point in the scene. The CAMERA project is investigating methods for producing virtual models of these sorts of scenes, using distance and intensity data. In the future, as the project progresses, we plan to show the reconstructed virtual scene here as well.

A more detailed summary of the project objectives.

You can see some of our current research results.

PARTNERS

The CAMERA team consists of: Fraunhofer Institut Graphische Datenverarbeitung (Germany), Instituto Superior Technico (Portugal), Ispra European Commission Joint Research Centre (Italy), Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan (Sweden), LAAS-CNRS (France), UK Robotics (United Kingdom) and Univ. of Edinburgh (United Kingdom).

More information about the partners.

NETWORK ACTIVITIES

• 23 person-years of staff exchanges (approximately 24 post-doctoral and 18 doctoral months per site)
• Doctoral students will spend some time at both the industrial partner and another CAMERA network partner
• The network will hold 6 monthly workshops.
• The network will host an international conference on a topic related to the network activities.
• A book will be collated from the collected network publications (and hopefuly published).

DOCTORAL AND POST-DOCTORAL POSITION ADVERTS

NO MORE POSITIONS ARE AVAILABLE BECAUSE THE PROJECT IS FINISHED

COORDINATOR

Date of last update: January 21, 2004