If I take a picture with a camera, so I know the distance from the camera to the object, such as a scale model of a house, I would like to turn this into a 3D model that I can maneuver around so I can comment on different parts of the house.
If I sit down and think about taking more than one picture, labeling direction, and distance, I should be able to figure out how to do this, but, I thought I would ask if someone has some paper that may help explain more.
What language you explain in doesn't matter, as I am looking for the best approach.
Right now I am considering showing the house, then the user can put in some assistance for height, such as distance from the camera to the top of that part of the model, and given enough of this it would be possible to start calculating heights for the rest, especially if there is a top-down image, then pictures from angles on the four sides, to calculate relative heights.
Then I expect that parts will also need to differ in color to help separate out the various parts of the model.
As mentioned, the problem is very hard and is often also referred to as multi-view object reconstruction. It is usually approached by solving the stereo-view reconstruction problem for each pair of consecutive images.
Performing stereo reconstruction requires that pairs of images are taken that have a good amount of visible overlap of physical points. You need to find corresponding points such that you can then use triangulation to find the 3D co-ordinates of the points.
Epipolar geometry
Stereo reconstruction is usually done by first calibrating your camera setup so you can rectify your images using the theory of epipolar geometry. This simplifies finding corresponding points as well as the final triangulation calculations.
If you have:
the intrinsic camera parameters (requiring camera calibration),
the camera's position and rotation (it's extrinsic parameters), and
8 or more physical points with matching known positions in two photos (when using the eight-point algorithm)
you can calculate the fundamental and essential matrices using only matrix theory and use these to rectify your images. This requires some theory about co-ordinate projections with homogeneous co-ordinates and also knowledge of the pinhole camera model and camera matrix.
If you want a method that doesn't need the camera parameters and works for unknown camera set-ups you should probably look into methods for uncalibrated stereo reconstruction.
Correspondence problem
Finding corresponding points is the tricky part that requires you to look for points of the same brightness or colour, or to use texture patterns or some other features to identify the same points in pairs of images. Techniques for this either work locally by looking for a best match in a small region around each point, or globally by considering the image as a whole.
If you already have the fundamental matrix, it will allow you to rectify the images such that corresponding points in two images will be constrained to a line (in theory). This helps you to use faster local techniques.
There is currently still no ideal technique to solve the correspondence problem, but possible approaches could fall in these categories:
Manual selection: have a person hand-select matching points.
Custom markers: place markers or use specific patterns/colours that you can easily identify.
Sum of squared differences: take a region around a point and find the closest whole matching region in the other image.
Graph cuts: a global optimisation technique based on optimisation using graph theory.
For specific implementations you can use Google Scholar to search through the current literature. Here is one highly cited paper comparing various techniques:
A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Dense Two-Frame Stereo Correspondence Algorithms.
Multi-view reconstruction
Once you have the corresponding points, you can then use epipolar geometry theory for the triangulation calculations to find the 3D co-ordinates of the points.
This whole stereo reconstruction would then be repeated for each pair of consecutive images (implying that you need an order to the images or at least knowledge of which images have many overlapping points). For each pair you would calculate a different fundamental matrix.
Of course, due to noise or inaccuracies at each of these steps you might want to consider how to solve the problem in a more global manner. For instance, if you have a series of images that are taken around an object and form a loop, this provides extra constraints that can be used to improve the accuracy of earlier steps using something like bundle adjustment.
As you can see, both stereo and multi-view reconstruction are far from solved problems and are still actively researched. The less you want to do in an automated manner the more well-defined the problem becomes, but even in these cases quite a bit of theory is required to get started.
Alternatives
If it's within the constraints of what you want to do, I would recommend considering dedicated hardware sensors (such as the XBox's Kinect) instead of only using normal cameras. These sensors use structured light, time-of-flight or some other range imaging technique to generate a depth image which they can also combine with colour data from their own cameras. They practically solve the single-view reconstruction problem for you and often include libraries and tools for stitching/combining multiple views.
Epipolar geometry references
My knowledge is actually quite thin on most of the theory, so the best I can do is to further provide you with some references that are hopefully useful (in order of relevance):
I found a PDF chapter on Multiple View Geometry that contains most of the critical theory. In fact the textbook Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision should also be quite useful (sample chapters available here).
Here's a page describing a project on uncalibrated stereo reconstruction that seems to include some source code that could be useful. They find matching points in an automated manner using one of many feature detection techniques. If you want this part of the process to be automated as well, then SIFT feature detection is commonly considered to be an excellent non-real-time technique (since it's quite slow).
A paper about Scene Reconstruction from Multiple Uncalibrated Views.
A slideshow on Methods for 3D Reconstruction from Multiple Images (it has some more references below it's slides towards the end).
A paper comparing different multi-view stereo reconstruction algorithms can be found here. It limits itself to algorithms that "reconstruct dense object models from calibrated views".
Here's a paper that goes into lots of detail for the case that you have stereo cameras that take multiple images: Towards robust metric reconstruction
via a dynamic uncalibrated stereo head. They then find methods to self-calibrate the cameras.
I'm not sure how helpful all of this is, but hopefully it includes enough useful terminology and references to find further resources.
Research has made significant progress and these days it is possible to obtain pretty good-looking 3D shapes from 2D images. For instance, in our recent research work titled "Synthesizing 3D Shapes via Modeling Multi-View Depth Maps and Silhouettes With Deep Generative Networks" took a big step in solving the problem of obtaining 3D shapes from 2D images. In our work, we show that you can not only go from 2D to 3D directly and get a good, approximate 3D reconstruction but you can also learn a distribution of 3D shapes in an efficient manner and generate/synthesize 3D shapes. Below is an image of our work showing that we are able to do 3D reconstruction even from a single silhouette or depth map (on the left). The ground-truth 3D shapes are shown on the right.
The approach we took has some contributions related to cognitive science or the way the brain works: the model we built shares parameters for all shape categories instead of being specific to only one category. Also, it obtains consistent representations and takes the uncertainty of the input view into account when producing a 3D shape as output. Therefore, it is able to naturally give meaningful results even for very ambiguous inputs. If you look at the citation to our paper you can see even more progress just in terms of going from 2D images to 3D shapes.
This problem is known as Photogrammetry.
Google will supply you with endless references, just be aware that if you want to roll your own, it's a very hard problem.
Check out The Deadalus Project, althought that website does not contain a gallery with illustrative information about the solution, it post several papers and info about the working method.
I watched a lecture from one of the main researchers of the project (Roger Hubbold), and the image results are quite amazing! Althought is a complex and long problem. It has a lot of tricky details to take into account to get an approximation of the 3d data, take for example the 3d information from wall surfaces, for which the heuristic to work is as follows: Take a photo with normal illumination of the scene, and then retake the picture in same position with full flash active, then substract both images and divide the result by a pre-taken flash calibration image, apply a box filter to this new result and then post-process to estimate depth values, the whole process is explained in detail in this paper (which is also posted/referenced in the project website)
Google Sketchup (free) has a photo matching tool that allows you to take a photograph and match its perspective for easy modeling.
EDIT: It appears that you're interested in developing your own solution. I thought you were trying to obtain a 3D model of an image in a single instance. If this answer isn't helpful, I apologize.
Hope this helps if you are trying to construct 3d volume from 2d stack of images !! You can use open source tool such as ImageJ Fiji which comes with 3d viewer plugin..
https://quppler.com/creating-a-classifier-using-image-j-fiji-for-3d-volume-data-preparation-from-stack-of-images/
I'm trying to work out how to measure an object in a photograph. I want to measure the actual, real-world size of it. Luckily, this object has a scale in cm. My thinking is that I measure the pixels in the scale, and use that to then determine the size of the other object/s in the photo. I've been working on this in scikit images with mixed results. One of the issues I get is that the resolution of the image changes the measurement. So, it seems that thresholding for the scale and extracting pixel counts does not work.
I know that OpenCV has the ability to measure objects with a bounding box, however the objects I'm trying to measure have uneven sides/edges, and this needs to be accounted for (the shape of the object is important too, and I can capture that using thresholding and contours).
I'm hoping that people on this board can point me in alternate/better directions for trying to solve this issue. Perhaps my approach is all wrong. Thank you.
Example photo of vase with 10 cm scale. (https://i.stack.imgur.com/dK2BZ.jpg)
As I understand, anchor-based is using multiple box at once to predict bounding box close to ground truth.
1. Is it correct?
2. And what is anchor-free?
3. What is the difference between anchor-based and anchor-free (methods, pros, cons,...)?
I'm new and thanks for any answer!
The following paper is providing a quick overview which you might be interested in. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9233610
What I understood is that there are some approaches to finding bounding boxes. These are categorized as
Sliding window: Consider all possible bounding boxes
Anchor-based: Get a way to find prior knowledge on what widths and heights are more suitable for every class type (it is basically the same as learning common aspect ratios for each class). Then tile those bounding boxes in the image and just predict the probability of those tiles.
YOLOv5 uses clustering to estimate anchor-boxes before training and saves them. With that said, it does have its disadvantages. The first is that you must learn anchor-boxes for each class. The second is that your accuracy may be based on your anchor box prediction.
Anchor-free: Instead of using prior knowledge or considering all possibilities, they predict two points (top-left and bottom-right) for every object directly.
Yolov3, Yolov4 and Yolov5 use anchors but YOLOX and CornerNet don't.
Though not a complete explanation, I think you get the point.
References:
Anchor Boxes for Object Detection
A fully convolutional anchor-free object detector
Forget the hassles of Anchor boxes with FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection
I am trying to obtain the relative depth of pixels of an image. For example, the image in https://www.awn.com/news/nvidia-unveils-quadro-rtx-worlds-first-ray-tracing-gpu . I don't need the precise distance of each pixel, which I believe would be impossible, but I would like to get something as "the green ball is further than the other balls". Is it possible using OpenCV in python? The codes I generated can identify each ball, but not their relative distance or depth, so they are pretty much useless to my intents.
That's an ill-posed problem (you can not measure depth with a single RGB camera) and a topic of resent research. I found this survey paper. Most often a depth image is learned from an RGB image using convolutional neural networks.
However, if you use a lot of prior information about your scene (all objects are circular within in the image and the partially visible circles corresponds to the ones which are in the background), then you might be able to do something with heuristical methods like, thresholding, edge detection or hough transforms, but it won't be easy.
I am working on a project to figure out the difference between two objects and tag them with the proper model code.
I need help with a suggestion on how can we tackle such problem with image processing using OpenCV, following are the images
Till now I tried calculating black pixel difference between two images after doing binary threshold and also calculated a number of holes present on the gasket.
I also tried using feature points but it didn't worked well
what else can be done to improve the detection?
Thank you
The holes are excellent features that can be robustly detected by blob analysis.
In the first place, locate the large circle and determine its center and radius. The radius might be a first discriminant feature.
Next, establish the configuration of the screw holes around the center. You can use the distance to the center, the number of holes and the angles they define around the center.
If this is still not enough, you can register the gaskets and compare them to the models by matching the screw holes, adjusting the rotation, then comparing pixel-wise with a similarity measure such as SAD or SSD.