SBIR Phase I: Fast Creation of Photorealistic 3D Models using Consumer Hardware

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will be large: a successful project would transform the construction industry, making it far more efficient by reducing legal conflicts, schedule slips and poor decision making; the project has the potential to make real estate sales and marketing more efficient by allowing buyers and sellers to accurately represent properties online, reducing the need for on-site visits. The proposed work will enable the fast and easy creation of 100% complete visual documentation of a physical space; this documentation can be generated many times throughout the course of construction. In so doing, the proposed project will allow professionals in the construction industry to track progress and communicate with their teams far more efficiently than ever before. A second exciting effect of the proposal will be the creation of vast, detailed, never before seen datasets of construction projects and real estate, allowing technical innovations in artificial intelligence and computer vision to impact one of the largest industries in the nation and the world. For example, systems could be trained to automatically spot safety concerns, augmenting the efforts of safety managers and keeping workers safer than ever before. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a fast, easy to use and cheap method to create photorealistic 3D models using off the shelf consumer hardware. Technical hurdles include validating the quality and efficacy of models generated with consumer hardware, near instantaneous creation of 3D models on device, and automatic creation of routes through the 3D space without human annotation. With these hurdles cleared, advanced work might include automated analytics between and among 3D models of the same site captured over time. Because of the system's ease of use, it will enable the collection of large, totally novel datasets. The goal of the research is to produce a prototype that a layperson can use to create a 3D model of a physical site in order to document it. The plan to reach these goals includes iterative software development against the hurdles listed above, as well as continuous user feedback to guide and refine development.