Israeli Researchers Debut Software That Extracts 3-D Objects From Photos

In recent years, the falling cost of 3-D printers has been a major driver of technical innovation and job growth. The gradual entry of individuals and small businesses into 3-D printing accounts for much of the excitement about the industry — but only a small fraction of its $2.2 billion market footprint.

One of major barriers to entry is the difficulty of generating the 3-D computer models that serve as the instruction sheets for printers.

In a paper they will present at Siggraph Asia in December, Ariel Shamir, of the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya, and Daniel Cohen-Or and Tao Chen of Tel Aviv University hope to knock that barrier down with software they've developed that allows the user to extract the beginnings of a 3-D model of an object from a single photograph.

“The key idea is that you could create 3D objects based only on single images,” Shamir told Singularity Hub. “We wanted a model that would be simple for almost anyone to use.”

In other words, if one saw an object only once and took a decent photograph of it, one could could print up a prototype of it later that day.

Users can already produce 3-D models from photographs, but 3-Sweep ostensibly makes it faster and easier by eliminating the need for expensive, labor-intensive CAD software.

The trouble is one that most users of Photoshop have encountered: Computers are not very good at identifying where one image ends and another begins. But humans are. The software, called 3-Sweep, invites the human user to identify simple three-dimensional objects for the computer by drawing a line across each of its three basic axes.