On Jan 25, 2008 8:31 AM, STEPHEN THISTLE wrote:
> I am relatively new to flight gear and am interested in using it as a
> visualization tool for UAV's. I would like to replace the fg scenery with
> images captured from a camera onboard an aircraft. I was wondering if there
> is any way to import images into flightgear on the fly. The basic goal would
> be to show live video where available and fall over to flight gear visuals
> when the feed is lost(using a custom view from the camera perspective) .I am
> not sure if this is currently possible but I would like to explore the idea
> either using external tools or contributing to fg. Also a link to some
> documentation on the fg architecture especially how it handles the
> visualizations would be greatly appreciated.
>
I don't think there's any current way to do this. However, I think what is
needed is to link in some video capture library to do frame grabs from your
video camera as quickly as possible. Then do whatever bit fiddling is
needed to scale/convert the raster image to an opengl texture. Then draw
this texture on a quad that is aligned correctly relative to the camera. It
might be possible to get fancy and alpha blend the edges a bit.
Given an image and the location and orientation of the camera, it would be
possible to locate world coordinates across a grid on that image. That
would allow a quick/crude orthorectification where the image could be
rubber sheeted onto the terrain. This would take some offline processing,
but you could end up building up a near real time 3d view of the world than
could then be viewed from a variety of perspectives. The offline tools
could update the master images based on resolution or currency ... that's
probably a phd project for someone, but many of the pieces are already in
place and the results could be extremely nice and extremely useful (think
managing the effort to fight a dynamic forest fire, or other
emergency/disaster management, traffic monitoring, construction sites,
city/county management & planning, etc.) I could even imagine some
distrubuted use of this so that if you have several uav's out flying over an
area, they could send their imagery back to a central location to update a
master database ... then the individual operators could see near real time
3d views of places that another uav has already overflown.
If we started building up more functionality in this area, there are a lot
of different directions we could take it, all of which could be extremely
cool.
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson: http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/
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