CEX3D INVERSE'S CRITICAL TODO-LIST BEFORE ALPHA RELEASE

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CeX3D Inverse is Hardcore Processing's upcoming new product, a computer program for constructing digital 3D models from ordinary camera images automatically.

The Critical TODO-List

Many people have asked when CeX3D Inverse will be ready. This is hard to say exactly. However, the following is a list of the primary remaining issues. We refer to this list as CeX3D Inverse's critical TODO-list before alpha release and we will post news on this website as each issue on this list is solved. The list is a bit technical, but it may be thought of as simply a numbered list of things that have to be done:

1. One of the currently used methods in CeX3D Inverse is known to violate patents. We have found methods to replace it and this will have to be implemented before any software can be released
2. The fully automated camera calibration is currently not accurate enough. It still has inaccuracies of approximately one pixel. This inaccuracy should at least get below half a pixel, before the reconstruction can be convincing enough. There are currently two known sources of these inaccuracies. Correcting those two should make the calibration good enough; both are minor details implementation-wise
3. The actual 3D reconstruction currently seems to work but is not yet very well-tested. There are a few known issues with it that have to be solved
4. CeX3D Inverse currently generates a lot of technical information that we use internally at Hardcore Processing for chasing down program-errors. This has to be removed before CeX3D Inverse can be released and used by users
5. Two parts of CeX3D Inverse are still fairly slow. We hope to improve significantly on the speed of these two parts before the release. We aim for CeX3D Inverse to take only minutes, instead of hours, hopefully only seconds, at least for smaller sets of images. Obviously, handling many images will always takes longer than handling just a few
6. Support for more image formats as input and more 3D formats as output is necessary. The advanced software modules that were developed for another of Hardcore Processing's products, CeX3D Converter, will make this fairly quick to implement, even for file formats not currently supported by CeX3D Converter
7. The initial versions of CeX3D Inverse will be for Linux and as a command-line program. This is useful when using Linux and when writing scripts, but may not be useful to everyone. A Windows version will have to be created as well and fortunately, by design, CeX3D Inverse does not really depend on anything Linux-specific. Further, a version with a graphical user-interface will have to be created, hopefully making many users happy. Notice: A version for Mac OS X is intended to appear at some point, though this will be a bit further into the future

To assure you that we are continually making progress and improving on CeX3D Inverse, the following are some important achievements since the beginning of August 2011:

• One of the previously used methods have been optimized from taking more than one hour into taking less than a couple of seconds. This part is critical and is executed multiple times for a 3D reconstruction, meaning that this gave a tremendous improvement in speed
• CeX3D Inverse has been extended from being able to reconstruct 3D from only two images into being able to reconstruct from multiple (two or more) images. This has required more effort than initially anticipated and is part of the reason for the delay of the development, since this has taken months to implement. Completing this was a major step

Follow the news page (click here) to see the latest status and achievements.

Modified: 2015-04-12
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