CVIU special issue on Virtual Representations and Modeling of Large-scale environments

Recent developments in computer vision have improved the performance of structure from motion and multi-view stereo techniques towards the reconstruction of large scale environments. At the same time progress in computer graphics and network technology allow for effective visualization and delivery of such visual representations. As consumer applications are being deployed, a wide field of applications is opening up for real-world 3D modeling techniques.

Despite the enormous progress there are still many challenges left. Very large scale structure from motion with millions of images has open problems of: effectively scaling computations, consistency over large areas. Small artifacts often visually degrade relatively accurate reconstructions. How can one deal with windows or other surfaces with more complicated surface properties, trees and other occluding objects, which cause often holes in the reconstructions. The variability and change occurring in real-world environments poses additional challenges. The appearance of a scene varies over the course of the day and with the seasons, changes in geometry also occur at different temporal scales, from cars/pedestrians to building construction/destruction. Often, a complete detailed geometric reconstruction might not be the most appropriate model and image-based representations can be preferable for some applications.

The special issue invites researchers from computer vision, computer graphics, photogrammetry and related areas to present their work addressing the above problems:

3D reconstruction of large-scale environments
Large-scale/wide-area structure-from-motion
Close-range photogrammetry
4D reconstructions and temporal inference
Geometry/appearance/illumination changes of environments
Visualization of large-scale models
Image-based navigation of environments
Multi-sensor platform for large-scale modeling
automatic/interactive modeling of urban structures
wide-baseline matching in urban environments
innovative applications for large scale models

Important dates:

Papermanuscript submission deadline:	May 26th, 2008
First Notification:	September 1st, 2008
Revised manuscript submission:	October 30th, 2008
Notification of final decision:	December 1st, 2008
Final manuscript due:	January 1st, 2009
Publication of special issue:	early 2009

Author information:

Paper format:

CVIU format

Guest Editors:

Jan-Michael Frahm, UNC Chapel Hill, USA
Marc Pollefeys, UNC Chapel Hill, USA
Frank Dellaert, Gerogia Tech, USA
Jana Kosecka, George Mason U., USA