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ORENSIC
experts who reconstruct crime scenes want to produce detailed drawings
that can stand up in court without disrupting sensitive evidence. But
creating hand-drawn sketches and taking photographs can take days and
disturb the scene. Computer-aided design packages that require
investigators in the field to enter data can be cumbersome, and results
can be difficult for jurors to decipher.
Now, a Canadian company is demonstrating prototype software, based on advances in computer vision, that can stitch together a few seconds of video from a hand-held stereo camera into a detailed 3-D model of a room, including the people and the objects in it. Using Windows on a laptop, the police or courtroom workers can zoom around the model to view it from different perspectives, or click on its features to see sizes, relative distances, areas and angles.