ContextCapture – Turn Photos into High-quality Models

Take a look at ContextCapture, a solution by Acute3D, that lets you produce high-resolution 3D models from simple photographs. The tool analyzes several photographs of a static subject, taken from different viewpoints, to create a 3D model of this subject. 

The most important thing here is that the solution doesn’t require super expensive cameras. Your simple camera is all you need to create high-quality models.

Features

• A camera can be used on the field by a non-expert operator, even under difficult/uncontrolled conditions: without a tripod, without respecting a rigid distance range, under adverse weather 
• Contrarily to most 3D scanners, a camera provides high resolution color information, which ContextCapture automatically maps to the reconstructed geometry, to directly produce a realistic photo-textured 3D model.
• Because acquisition is not tied to the availability of some special device in some particular place, ContextCaptureis much more generalizable and ubiquitous than 3D scanning.
• In contrast with a 3D scanner, ContextCapture allows to reconstruct subjects of various scales, ranging from centimeters to kilometers, photographed from the ground or from the air. There is no limit in the precision of the resulting 3D model, other than the resolution of the input photographs.

ContextCapture is said to not only produce a dense point cloud that has to be processed/analyzed with some dedicated software, but also a textured 3D triangular mesh, much more amenable to display, editing or 3D printing. You can find more details on the solution here.