The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Nov. 16, 2004
Filed:
Jul. 17, 2000
Z. Jason Geng, Kensington, MD (US);
Other;
Abstract
An imaging method and system for 3D modeling of a 3D surface forms a mosaic from multiple uncalibrated 3D images, without relying on camera position data to merge the 3D images. The system forms the 3D model by merging two 3D images to form a mosaiced image, merging the mosaiced image with another 3D image, and repeating the merging process with new 3D images one by one until the 3D model is complete. The images are aligned in a common coordinate system via spatial transformation and preferably merged using a fuzzy weighting average function to smooth boundary areas between 3D images. The 3D model may be compressed using image compression techniques. In one embodiment, a 2D texture/color overlay is placed over the 3D model to provide a more realistic representation of the object being modeled.