Senior Project - 3DiGrAA

Vexcel Corporation is a small R&D software engineering firm which performs work for government contractors such as NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. Their primary area of expertise is remote sensing. Much of the work involves reconstructing 3D information about large and small objects ranging from entire planets to relatively small objects like pipes and boilers in industrial plants. A variety of sensors are used to derive this 3D information, including aerial mapping cameras, digital cameras, satellite images, and various types of radar. The goal of this project was to create a 3D "digitizer" for graphic arts and related applications. This project was achieved by providing a graphical user interface to existing image processing and photogrammetric algorithms, which allow 3D information to be extracted from pairs of images taken from slightly different angles, currently used to reconstruct the surface geometry of the Earth. The system was developed using an object-oriented approach in C++ and Motif to run on UNIX workstations.