Avideh Zakhor and her team at UC Berkley recently modeled downtown Berkeley in 4½ hours (26 minutes of driving plus 4 hours of data processing). How is this possible!? Professor Zakhor and her team mounted lasers and digital cameras to virtually any vehicle, thus making truck or plane a highly efficient large scale scanner. Initial usage of the device is aimed at military purposes using unmanned aircrafts in swarms to scan and model enemy territory for further study. Zakhor is also developing a time based scanner resulting in a 4-dimensional model.
Here is a video of Professor Avideh's talk on 3D city modeling at Google, October 2006; 60 mins - Good job to her and her team that is focusing on this topic. They are raising the bar and breaking new grounds in the realm of 3D modeling and data collection:
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