People

Staff: Simon Gibson (principal researcher), Roger Hubbold, Toby Howard (project manager), Alan Murta. Ph.D. students: Dan Oram and James Sinnott.

Project summary

The focus of the REVEAL project is the construction of fully interactive virtual environments which faithfully represent real-world scenes.

Constructing such environments has traditionally been extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming. We are investigating automatic and semi-automatic computer-vision techniques to aid in the extraction of geometric and illumination information from image sequences.

The results of this research are being applied to scene-of-crime reconstruction for Police forensic analysis and training purposes. Building on a previous collaboration with the Computer Examinations Unit of the Greater Manchester Police, we are studying the potential use of these techniques for the reconstruction of virtual scenes-of-crime. For this application, fast and accurate model construction is essential so that the resulting virtual environment can be used during investigations. Specific uses include analysing data (such as visualising bullet trajectories), checking witness statements, helping witnesses to recall information (virtual reconstructions), visualising routes through a building (for example, determining what can be seen from different vantage points), briefing officers, and use as a tool for evaluating different scenarios. The facility to experiment with different lighting conditions also provides a powerful investigative tool which normal photography and video recording cannot offer

Research areas

Within the REVEAL project, we're pursuing several strands of research:

Interactive reconstruction of virtual environments from photographs (Simon Gibson).
Recovery of surface material and illumination properties from images (Simon Gibson)
Automatic Recovery of Geometry from Video Sequences (Dan Oram)
Interactive Model Matching in Virtual Environments (James Sinnott). He's investigating model matching using superquadrics.

Project funding and partners

REVEAL is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (grant number GR/M14531) and Greater Manchester Police. The project runs from April 1998 to March 2001. We are also collaborating with the United Kingdom's National Training Centre for Scientific Support to Crime Investigation (NTCSSCI).

Related publications

S. Gibson, T.L.J. Howard, and R. Hubbold. Flexible image-based photometric reconstruction using virtual light sources. In Proceedings of Eurographics 2001, September 2001. Manchester, UK. [ .html | .pdf ]

S. Gibson and T.L.J. Howard. Interactive reconstruction of virtual environments from photographs, with application to scene-of-crime analysis. In Proceedings of ACM Symposium in Virtual Reality Software and Technology 2000, October 2000. Seoul, Korea. [ http | .pdf ]

T.L.J. Howard, S. Gibson, and A. Murta. Virtual environments for scene of crime reconstruction and analysis. In Proceedings of SPIE Electronic Imaging 2000, volume 3960, January 2000. San Jose, ISBN 0-8194-3578-3. [ http | .pdf ]

A. Murta, S. Gibson, T.L.J. Howard, R. Hubbold, and A. West. Modelling and rendering for scene of crime reconstruction: a case-study. In Proceedings of Eurographics UK 98, March 1998. Leeds, UK. [ .ps.Z ]