Research and System Design for Rapid Generation of Photo-mapped Terrain Databases

CSI proposes to design a system for rapid generation of photo- realistic terrain databases for use in real-time visual simulation. In Phase I, we will perform research and design the overall framework and essential software components of the system, and identify future research and feasibility issues for Phase II. Existing tools for terrain database generation are either too slow, too inflexible or too unreliable to be practical for many applications. We propose to design a flexible system that can quickly and reliably generate a complete, simulation-ready database using terrain imagery with a variety of ancillary inputs including digital elevation data, camera calibration parameters, ground truths, and user-identified feature correspondences. The main features of the proposed system are: 1. Unified framework for terrain reconstruction and image registration. 2. Terrain mesh optimization for real-time scene generation. 3. Texture map compositing from multiple images. The first feature will be the primary focus of our research and development. We propose to devise an extensible framework based on current research for the fusion of photogrammetry and computer vision techniques (e.g., stereo correspondence, shape-from-shading, camera calibration) for terrain image registration and reconstruction.