Announcing OpenVis3d

Post by Luc Vincent, Uber Tech Lead

While he was working on his PhD at the University of Maryland, Abhijit Ogale developed a set of advanced computer vision tools in Matlab. He made this set of tools available for download from the UMD web site, and quickly noticed that his site was getting quite a bit of traffic. In fact, earlier this year the software was getting downloaded about 1,000 times per month. Not bad for a fairly esoteric piece of software...

Today, we are very pleased to announce that thanks to a grant from Google, Abhijit has turned this useful Matlab code into an even more useful open source, state-of-the-art 3D vision library, OpenVis3d, hosted on Google Code. The overall goal of the project is to provide a library of efficient 3D computer vision routines for image and video processing. This library will eventually include routines for dense stereo matching, optical flow (motion) estimation, occlusion detection, egomotion (3D self-motion) estimation, structure from motion, and a lot more -- we hope you find it useful!

By the way, in case it isn't obvious, Google is very interested in computer vision and graphics. We recently attended Siggraph'06 in Boston, where we demonstrated the latest and greatest versions of Google Earth and SketchUp. But we're doing a lot more than that - we're also hiring talented computer vision and graphics people -- see this page for more information. In fact, Abhijit Ogale recently joined Google!