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Is there any algorithm for converting the 2d images into 3d model? [duplicate]

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/

How do you detect if there is motion between frames using opencv without simply subtracting the frames?

I have a camera in a fixed position looking at a target and I want to detect whether someone walks in front of the target. The lighting in the scene can change so subtracting the new changed frame from the previous frame would therefore detect motion even though none has actually occurred. I have thought to compare the number of contours (obtained by using findContours() on a binary edge image obtained with canny and then getting size() of this) between the two frames as a big change here could denote movement while also being less sensitive to lighting changes, I am quite new to OpenCV and my implementations have not been successful so far. Is there a way I could make this work or will I have to just subtract the frames. I don't need to track the person, just detect whether they are in the scene.

I am a bit rusty but there are various ways to do this.
SIFT and SURF are very expensive operations, so I don't think you would want to use them.
There are a couple of 'background removal' methods.
Average removal: in this one you get the average of N frames, and consider it as BG. This is vulnerable to many things, light changes, shadow, moving object staying at a location for long time etc.
Gaussian Mixture Model: a bit more advanced than 1. Still vulnerable to a lot of things.
IncPCP (incremental principal component pursuit): I can't remember the algorithm totally but basic idea was they convert each frame to a sparse form, then extract the moving objects from sparse matrix.
Optical flow: you find the change across the temporal domain of a video. For example, you compare frame2 with frame1 block by block and tell the direction of change.
CNN based methods: I know there are a bunch of them, but I didn't really follow them. You might have to do some research. As far as I know, they often are better than the methods above.
Notice that, for a #30Fps, your code should complete in 33ms per frame, so it could be real time. You can find a lot of code available for this task.

There are a handful of ways you could do this.
The first that comes to mind is doing a 2D FFT on the incoming images. Color shouldn't affect the FFT too much, but an object moving, entering/exiting a frame will.
The second is to use SIFT or SURF to generate a list of features in an image, you can insert these points into a map, sorted however you like, then do a set_difference between the last image you took, and the current image that you have. You could also use the FLANN functionality to compare the generated features.

Creating string art from image

I am relatively new to python. I would like to make some string-art portraits. I was watching this video which really intrigued me:
https://youtu.be/RSRNZaq30W0?t=56
I understand that to achieve this, I would first need to load the image, then do some edge-detection and then use some form of Delaunay triangulation but have no idea where to even start.
I looked up some sample code for OpenCV and figured out how to do basic edge-detection. How do I then convert those to points? And then what sort of algorithm would I need to "fill in" the different gradients?
I don't even know if this is the right approach to achieve this. Could someone please point me in the right direction and perhaps give me some sample code to get started? I would really appreciate it very much.

Edge detection or triangulation is less important in this application. The core part is to understand the pseudo-code at 1:27 of the video. The final product uses a single string at wrap around different nails in particular way, so that: darker areas in original image have less string density, and brighter areas have more strings crossing over.
The initial preparation is to:
generate an edge dection version of the image (A)
generate a blurred version of the image (B)
Then the first step is to create random positions for the nails. Apparently to achieve a good outcome, if a random-generated nail is close enough to the 'edge' of a black-white image, you should 'snap' it to the edge, so that later the strings wrapping around these edge nails will create an accurate boundary just like in the original picture. Here you use the image A) to adjust your nails. For example, just perform some potential minimization:
Add small random position change to the nails. If a nail now gets
close enough to a white point (edge) in image A), directly change to
that position.
Compute the potential. Make sure your potential function
penalizes two points that come too close. Repeat 1) 100 times to
pick one with lowest potential.
Iterate 1) and 2) 20 times
Next you decide how you want the strings to wrap around the nails.
Starting from a point A, look at some neighboring points (within certain radius) B1, B2, B3, etc. Imagine if you attach a string with certain width from A to Bi, it visually changes your string image P in a slight way. Render line segment A-B1 on P to get P1, render A-B2 on P to get P2, etc.
Find the best Bi so that the new image Pi looks closer to the original. You can just do a pixel-wise comparison between the string image and the original picture, and use this measurement to score each Bi. The video author used a blurred image B) to get rid of textures that may randomly impact his scoring algorithm.
Now the optimal Bi becomes the new A. Find its neighbors and loop over. The algorithm may stop if adding any new strings only negatively impacts the score.
There are cases where bright areas in a photo are widely separated, so any white strings crossing the dark gap will only decrease the score. Use your judgement to tweak the algorithm to workaround those non-convex scenarios.

Robust detection of grid pattern in an image

I have written a program in Python which automatically reads score sheets like this one
At the moment I am using the following basic strategy:
Deskew the image using ImageMagick
Read into Python using PIL, converting the image to B&W
Calculate calculate the sums of pixels in the rows and the columns
Find peaks in these sums
Check the intersections implied by these peaks for fill.
The result of running the program is shown in this image:
You can see the peak plots below and to the right of the image shown in the top left. The lines in the top left image are the positions of the columns and the red dots show the identified scores. The histogram bottom right shows the fill levels of each circle, and the classification line.
The problem with this method is that it requires careful tuning, and is sensitive to differences in scanning settings. Is there a more robust way of recognising the grid, which will require less a-priori information (at the moment I am using knowledge about how many dots there are) and is more robust to people drawing other shapes on the sheets? I believe it may be possible using a 2D Fourier Transform, but I'm not sure how.
I am using the EPD, so I have quite a few libraries at my disposal.

First of all, I find your initial method quite sound and I would have probably tried the same way (I especially appreciate the row/column projection followed by histogramming, which is an underrated method that is usually quite efficient in real applications).
However, since you want to go for a more robust processing pipeline, here is a proposal that can probably be fully automated (also removing at the same time the deskewing via ImageMagick):
Feature extraction: extract the circles via a generalized Hough transform. As suggested in other answers, you can use OpenCV's Python wrapper for that. The detector may miss some circles but this is not important.
Apply a robust alignment detector using the circle centers.You can use Desloneux parameter-less detector described here. Don't be afraid by the math, the procedure is quite simple to implement (and you can find example implementations online).
Get rid of diagonal lines by a selection on the orientation.
Find the intersections of the lines to get the dots. You can use these coordinates for deskewing by assuming ideal fixed positions for these intersections.
This pipeline may be a bit CPU-intensive (especially step 2 that will proceed to some kind of greedy search), but it should be quite robust and automatic.

The correct way to do this is to use Connected Component analysis on the image, to segment it into "objects". Then you can use higher level algorithms (e.g. hough transform on the components centroids) to detect the grid and also determine for each cell whether it's on/off, by looking at the number of active pixels it contains.

Python OpenCV stereo camera position

I'd like to determine the position and orientation of a stereo camera relative to its previous position in world coordinates. I'm using a bumblebee XB3 camera and the motion between stereo pairs is on the order of a couple feet.
Would this be on the correct track?
Obtain rectified image for each pair
Detect/match feature points rectified images
Compute Fundamental Matrix
Compute Essential Matrix
Thanks for any help!

Well, it sounds like you have a fair understanding of what you want to do! Having a pre-calibrated stereo camera (like the Bumblebee) will then deliver up point-cloud data when you need it - but it also sounds like you basically want to also use the same images to perform visual odometry (certainly the correct term) and provide absolute orientation from a last known GPS position, when the GPS breaks down.
First things first - I wonder if you've had a look at the literature for some more ideas: As ever, it's often just about knowing what to google for. The whole idea of "sensor fusion" for navigation - especially in built up areas where GPS is lost - has prompted a whole body of research. So perhaps the following (intersecting) areas of research might be helpful to you:
Navigation in 'urban canyons'
Structure-from-motion for navigation
SLAM
Ego-motion
Issues you are going to encounter with all these methods include:
Handling static vs. dynamic scenes (i.e. ones that change purely based on the camera motion - c.f. others that change as a result of independent motion occurring in the scene: trees moving, cars driving past, etc.).
Relating amount of visual motion to real-world motion (the other form of "calibration" I referred to - are objects small or far away? This is where the stereo information could prove extremely handy, as we will see...)
Factorisation/optimisation of the problem - especially with handling accumulated error along the path of the camera over time and with outlier features (all the tricks of the trade: bundle adjustment, ransac, etc.)
So, anyway, pragmatically speaking, you want to do this in python (via the OpenCV bindings)?
If you are using OpenCV 2.4 the (combined C/C++ and Python) new API documentation is here.
As a starting point I would suggest looking at the following sample:
/OpenCV-2.4.2/samples/python2/lk_homography.py
Which provides a nice instance of basic ego-motion estimation from optic flow using the function cv2.findHomography.
Of course, this homography H only applies if the points are co-planar (i.e. lying on the same plane under the same projective transform - so it'll work on videos of nice flat roads). BUT - by the same principal we could use the Fundamental matrix F to represent motion in epipolar geometry instead. This can be calculated by the very similar function cv2.findFundamentalMat.
Ultimately, as you correctly specify above in your question, you want the Essential matrix E - since this is the one that operates in actual physical coordinates (not just mapping between pixels along epipoles). I always think of the Fundamental matrix as a generalisation of the Essential matrix by which the (inessential) knowledge of the camera intrinsic calibration (K) is omitted, and vise versa.
Thus, the relationships can be formally expressed as:
E = K'^T F K
So, you'll need to know something of your stereo camera calibration K after all! See the famous Hartley & Zisserman book for more info.
You could then, for example, use the function cv2.decomposeProjectionMatrix to decompose the Essential matrix and recover your R orientation and t displacement.
Hope this helps! One final word of warning: this is by no means a "solved problem" for the complexities of real world data - hence the ongoing research!