Flash LADAR

Flash LARDAR is a new sensor. We can call it 3D camera since it can simultaneously collect thousands of 3D points like a camera can simultaneously record color and reflectivity information for thousands of pixels.

Professor Carl Haas at University of Toronto (University of Texas Austin previously) are trying to use this new technology for spatial management on the construction site. This new technique can collect accurate 3D information directly and avoid the limitation of digital camera which requires complicated model to reconstruct depth information from multiple photos.

Professor Haas is also trying to merge the information from CAD model with 3D point clouds to enhance the speed and accuracy rate of traditional computer vision technique since in CAD model there is prerequisite knowledge about the 3D scene. But how to formally represent those knowledge in 3D model so that computer can automatically interpret 3D semantic information from 3D CAD model is a problem. The representation in IFC (a paper of Professor Grundig at UT Berlin talks about this from the perspective of a surveyor) and the semantic web technology might be of use to formally capture semantic information from 3D CAD model so that we can automatically extract knowledge from 3D model and help computer vision algorithms to interpret 3D point clouds which only contains xyz value and generate intelligent point clouds.

Good future is coming:-)