Badlands thinking
The keepers of the Badlands Petrified Gardens wanted a way to keep track of just where all their assets were because tourists would often grab a piece to take home as a souvenir and when they were found the group wanted to put them back in the correct place. They came up with some imaging software that would take the object and search through the database to see where it came from. The first job was to go out and take pictures of the entire area. This was accomplished with a low flying helicopter so that all the shots could be taken at the same height. Then these images were loaded into the computer and it began examining all the pieces of each individual picture and developing a table of length, width, height, and material and matching that to a grid of locations of the area. Now when they confiscate a piece that a tourist has tried to abscond with they simply take it to a special table where a picture is taken of it. The computer then takes that image and compares it to the images it has in memory and spits out a grid location. The worker can then look up that location on his own picture and place the object back in it’s original location with it’s original orientation.
Filed under: 3d, Business Software, Digital Cameras
