Cindy Z. 2024 | BASIS Independent Silicon Valley
- Project Title: Photogrammetry: Reconstructing 3D Scenes using Bit-sliced Indexing
- BASIS Independent Advisor: Swetha Bhattacharya
- Internship Location: San Jose State University
- Onsite Mentor: Gheorghi Guzun
To conduct operations during a disaster, emergency responders need to understand the infrastructure of the affected area. To map out the area with drones, I chose to employ photogrammetry using OpenSFM, which calculates the center of reference in a series of images to create a point cloud. In my research, I will introduce a data structure called bit-sliced indexing (BSI) to structure from motion, a type of photogrammetry. OpenSFM generally takes a few hours to run on 30 to 60 images, which generates a very photorealistic 3D model. Speeding up the binary operations will make creating 3D models time-efficient and increase the chances of the 3D model being useful for urgent scenarios. Building on my research with Professor Guzun in implementing BSI, I will implement the mathematical operations necessary to run structure from motion. Since all of BSI’s operations should run in linear time, the purpose of this project is to compete with the constant coefficients in NumPy’s also linear runtime. The added benefit of BSI’s compression scheme could also contribute to the resulting runtime.