Creation of Augmented Virtual Environments by Dynamic Fusion of Imagery and 3D Models

The rapid and reliable creation of realistic three-dimensional environment models is vital to virtual environment (VE) applications in engineering, mission planning, training simulations, entertainment, or tactical decision making and military operations in battlefield environments. While current sensing and modeling technologies offer useful methods for VE creation and visualization, several significant limitations remain. First, most modeling systems facilitate geometric modeling through the manipulation of either standard geometric primitives, libraries of premodeled objects, or manual digitizing of key points. Creating models of a large environment in this fashion takes enormous effort, skill, and time, resulting in not only high costs inhibiting the broad use of such models, but also making it burdensome to update and modify the models. Second, while most systems support texture mapping, they are limited to static texture databases that must be created prior to use. Static textures are usually derived from fixed cameras at known or computed transformations relative to the modeled objects. Once their relationships are established, the texture images are mapped to the geometric models during scene rendering. Such static texture-maps are limiting for applications requiring a dynamic and up-todate picture of the environment. In time-critical applications, such as military command and control, person or vehicle tracking, and catastrophe management, a rapid and accurate fusion of dynamic appearance and geometric data is critical. Real time video or other sensor data needs to update the VE models. There is little or no support for dynamic spatio-temporal update in the current structure of VE models, databases, and rendering systems.