The Hephaestus Project

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Hephaestus facilitates creation of 3d scenes from a depth camera that can be shared in our online community and interacted with on tablets.

Project Introduction

The Hephaestus team is Frank Ferro, Christopher Leslie, and Hal Canary.

Hephaestus will consist of three related applications:

1. A content acquisition application that makes use of the Kinect and the Point Cloud Library to construct a digital representation of a scene (possibly in VTK format). That digital representation will be in the form of surfaces arranged in scenes. This application will handle converting point clouds to surfaces and merging point clouds to form a 360° view of the objects.

2. A backend server that stores and manages the collection of scenes from users and organizations, possibly using MIDAS. The server will allow groups of users to share scenes with each other.

3. A set of viewing apps for rendering scenes (possibly making use of VES). The primary goal is the iOS and Android apps, but we also want a WebGL app and the ability to directly download files.

User Stories

An engineer wants to create a 3D model of an object and share it with collaborators across the world, some of whom only have smartphones. He connects a Kinect to a laptop, runs our capture application, and points the Kinect at the object from several angles. The application merges the point clouds and creates a triangulated mesh. When the engineer is happy with the mesh, he uploads the object mesh into the cloud where it is available for everyone on the team to see. His collaborators can get the mesh off the cloud and view the it via a WebGL/iOS/Android application, or simply download the mesh in a standard file format to edit as they please.

A salesman carries his tablet with him to show off 3D models of the devices he is selling. Ahead of time, his team had created scenes of the devices in use, in place, using the capture application.

Presentations

• Final Presentation 2012-12-10 (pdf)

• MIDAS Tech Talk 2012-11-07 (pdf)

Hephaestus Team Information

• Hephaestus Team Information

• Project Schedule

• Team Meetings

Platform Selections

• Platform Selections

Functional Specification

• Functional Specification

Manuals

• Design Document

• Hephaestus Scanner Maintenance Documentation

• Installation Guide

• User Manual: Scanner Application

• User Manual Plan

Repository for all Deliverables

https://github.com/HephaestusVision/hephaestus/

Related Links

• Markdown Syntax - used for documentation.
• Point Cloud Library
• OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision)
• OpenKinect / libfreenect
• VTK Visualization ToolKit
• Kitware
• MIDAS web-enabled data storage.
• VES VTK OpenGL ES Rendering Toolkit
• XTK (WegGL Viz)
• KiwiViewer multi-touch mobile device dataset viewer
• CMake software build tool
• Git version control
• QT GUI toolkit
• KinectFusion: Real-Time Dense Surface Mapping and Tracking
• KinectFusion: Real-time 3D Reconstruction and Interaction Using a Moving Depth Camera*