Automatic 3D Modeling and Analysis of Large Scale Urban Environments

Avideh Zakhor
UC Berkeley

Monday, October 26, 2009 at 1:00PM
54-134 Engineering IV Building
Refreshments Served

Abstract: Three dimensional modeling of objects, scenes, and urban environments, consisting of geometry and texture of visible surfaces, are useful in a variety of applications such as urban planning, training and simulation for disaster scenarios, virtual heritage conversation, and combating urban terrorism. In this talk I will describe an approach to fast, automated 3D model generation of urban environment so as to generate virtual, yet photorealistic walkthroughs drive throughs and fly throughs. To this end, we have developed two sets of modeling techniques; ground based, and airborne based. Our ground based modeling method uses a vehicle equipped with 2D laser scanners and a digital camera to acquire data to be processed offline, while driving under normal traffic conditions in public roads. Unlike previous approaches to urban modeling, this approach acquires data in a continuous "drive by scanning" way, rather than "stop and go" fashion. Associated with the ground based data set, is a set of algorithms we have developed in order to process the data and reconstruct the model in a fast, automated way; at the heart of these algorithms is Monte Carlo localization schemes that determine the position of our acquisition vehicle fairly accurately over long driving distances. Our airborne model is constructed from airborne laser data acquired with a flying airplane over the region of interest, and aerial images obtained from a helicopter at oblique angels. We have developed merging algorithms to combine the ground based and airborne models into one fused model which can then be used for virtual walkthroughs, drive throughs and fly throughs. I will show a 3D interactive model of downtown Berkeley. I will also briefly discuss related projects on recovering building floor plans from the exterior, and urban landscape classification from airborne Lidar data.

Biography: Avideh Zakhor joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1988 where she is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Her areas of interest include theories and applications of signal, image and video processing, 3D computer vision, and multimedia networking. She has won a number of best paper awards, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1997 and 2009, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 1997 and 1999, international conference on image processing in 1999, Packet Video Workshop in 2002, and IEEE Workshop on Multimodal Sentient Computing in 2007. She holds 6 U.S. patents, and is the co-author of three books with her students. She has been a PI or co-PI of four different MURI projects.

Prof. Zakhor received the B. S. degree from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the S. M. and Ph. D. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, all in electrical engineering, in 1983, 1985, and 1987 respectively. She was a General Motors scholar from 1982 to 1983, was a Hertz fellow from 1984 to 1988, received the Presidential Young Investigators (PYI) award, and Office of Naval Research (ONR) young investigator award in 1992. In 2001, she was elected as IEEE fellow and received the Okawa Prize in 2004.

She co-founded OPC technology in 1996, which was later by Mentor Graphics (Nasdaq: MENT) in 1998, Truvideo in 2000, and UrbanScan Inc. in 2005 which was acquired by Google in 2007.