The AVENUE project's goal is to automate the site modeling process. The main component of AVENUE is a system for photo-realistic 3D model acquisition from the combination of range and image sensing. The input is a sequence of unregistered range scans of the scene and a sequence of unregistered 2-D photographs of the same scene. The output is a true texture-mapped geometric model of the scene. Segmentation algorithms simplify the dense data-sets and provide stable features of interest which can be used for registration purposes. Solid modeling provides geometrically correct 3-D models, which can be automatically texture mapped from current or historic photographs. The system is comprehensive in that it addresses all phases of the modeling problem with a particular emphasis on automating the entire process. We present results from scanning and modeling a variety of objects ranging from buildings in New York City to the Cathedral of Ste. Pierre in Beauvais, France. The system currently resides on a mobile robot which will be used to model archaeological sites in Egypt.

Website: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/robotics