Three Dimensional Reconstruction of Botanical Trees with Simulatable Geometry
This addresses the need for simulatable tree models in fields like environmental simulation or gaming, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing reconstruction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of creating accurate 3D reconstructions of botanical trees for physical simulation, achieving results that exceed state-of-the-art in geometric and topological complexity and accuracy.
We tackle the challenging problem of creating full and accurate three dimensional reconstructions of botanical trees with the topological and geometric accuracy required for subsequent physical simulation, e.g. in response to wind forces. Although certain aspects of our approach would benefit from various improvements, our results exceed the state of the art especially in geometric and topological complexity and accuracy. Starting with two dimensional RGB image data acquired from cameras attached to drones, we create point clouds, textured triangle meshes, and a simulatable and skinned cylindrical articulated rigid body model. We discuss the pros and cons of each step of our pipeline, and in order to stimulate future research we make the raw and processed data from every step of the pipeline as well as the final geometric reconstructions publicly available.