Real time 3D mapping with Drones

Roberto Saracco August 2, 2016 Blog 167 Views

Lockheed Martin has announced Hydra Fusion, a software that allows real time 3D mapping using video streams from both stationary and mobile cameras. It has been designed principally to convert video streams captured by a drone (although it can also leverage on combined video streams generated by several drones) into a 3D rendering.
There are already a number of applications to create 3D rendering of images and video streams taken from drones but this is the first to be able to generate a seamless rendering in real time with an amazing resolution: 30 cm per pixel from a drone flying at 60km/h.  At lower speed (and altitude) the resolution can be increased to an astounding 2.5 cm.
Lockheed Martin is developing military product but for this kind of application they have used a commercial video camera and a commercial GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) hence creating a product that is affordable to a broad market.
The software is presented as "Lockheed Martin way of using big data". Indeed, the video streams are bringing in a lot of data and the rendering is a way of extracting semantics from the raw data.
Drones will become widespread in the next decade, and will be used for an amazing number of applications, from agriculture to city monitoring and even person monitoring companion. Movie stars may elect to use a drone as their official photographer, always around to capture snapshots of their life for the joy of their fans.
Of course, privacy will become an issue. Face recognition is already reality and will be perfected in the coming years. A drone can be directed to follow a person with or without him being aware of it. As he number of drones will grow and they will become part of the environment they will fade out of our perception but we won’t fade out of their, quite the opposite. 
As with any new disruptive technologies a host of new questions will pop up. An we have just begun!

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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