Operational Guide
Now is the time to explore the graphical user interface. After downloading the framework's binary from "Downloads" section, use the installer to set it up. Then, create a text file and define your scene and cameras configuration. Open the configuration file in the installation folder and set the path and name of the appropriate voxelizer and visualizer components, you want to use. Finally run the reconstruction application and use it to reconstruct and store the acquired results. All these steps are described in this section.
Installation process
This framework has been equipped with an installer application. The installer creates a folder in the given path and copies all the framework binaries and creates three subfolders. The first two subfolders are for storing different voxelizer and visualizer modules and the third one will be used for storing different scenes for the reconstruction. Each folder includes some sample data. The teapot scene also will be copied during installation. Furthermore two shortcuts will be created during the installation process, one on the desktop and the other in the programs section of the start menu, referring to the graphical user interface of the framework.
Input Data Format
The input file of reconstruction application is simply a text file, containing information about scene and configuration of cameras. The following part shows this file format describing a scene with one camera.
(X Min) (X Max) (X Voxel Count)
(Y Min) (Y Max) (Y Voxel Count)
(Z Min) (Z Max) (Z Voxel Count)
(Number of Time Steps)
(Number of Cameras)
(Camera Name)
(Eye Position X) (Eye Position Y) (Eye
Position Z)
(Look at Point X) (Look at Point Y) (Look at
Point Z)
(Up Vector X) (Up Vector Y) (Up Vector Z)
(Field of View)
(Aspect Ratio)
(Near Distance)
(Far Distance)
for example:
-80 80
64
-80 80
64
-10 75
64
10
1
Left
View Camera
96.444
153.471 -139.664
1.205
0 0
0 0 1
34.516
1.3333
0.1
1000
For each camera there should exist a folder with the same name as camera, beside the input file, containing images captured from that camera at each time step.
Configuration file
To informing reconstruction application about the voxelizer and visualizer which should be used during reconstruction process, the configuration file has been used. The following part shows the config file format and one sample config file.
<?xml
version="1.0"
encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<applicationSettings>
<VolumeReconstruction.Properties.Settings>
<setting
name="VoxelizerBinaryPath"
serializeAs="String">
<value>Sample
Voxelizer.dll</value>
</setting>
<setting
name="VoxelizerComponentName"
serializeAs="String">
<value>SampleVoxelizer.SampleVoxelizer</value>
</setting>
<setting
name="VisualizerBinaryPath"
serializeAs="String">
<value>Sample
Visualizer.dll</value>
</setting>
<setting
name="VisualizerComponentName"
serializeAs="String">
<value>SampleVisualizer.
SampleVisualizer </value>
</setting>
<setting
name="SurfaceOnly"
serializeAs="String">
<value>True</value>
</setting>
<setting
name="AlphaChangeOnly"
serializeAs="String">
<value>True</value>
</setting>
</VolumeReconstruction.Properties.Settings>
</applicationSettings>
</configuration>
In the voxelizer and visualizer binary path section, a complete path to the binary containing the components should be presented. Moreover, in the voxelizer and visualizer binary name section, a full name - including namespace - of implemented components should be described. The config file should be named same as application with a ".config" postfix and it should be placed in the same folder as reconstruction application. The installer will create a default config file in the given folder.
User Interface
The volumetric reconstruction framework accompanied with a Windows based user interface which helps users to easily control and monitor the implemented voxelizer and visualizer components. Figure 3 is a screen shot of the main window of this application.
Figure 3: the screen shot of volumetric reconstruction application,
initialized with teapot scene.
There are four different sections, separated with split bars, plus a toolbar and a status bar in this GUI. The toolbar contains all controls for loading scenes, running reconstruction and saving results. A progress bar placed in the status bar show the progress during the opening and reconstruction phase. Name of the loaded voxelizer is shown in the right part of status bar. After loading a scene, the upper left pane of the GUI, shows cameras and their information. Other scene related data including boundary and voxel resolution is shown in the left bottom pane. Images loaded for each camera at any time step are shown as a table in the upper right pane of the application. At last the reconstruction statistics for each time step is displayed in the bottom right pane.
Output Monitor
The visualization of reconstructed model can be seen using the output monitor which can be opened by pressing monitor button on the toolbar. Figure 4 shows a screen shot of the output monitor. The monitor window has a status bar which shows name of the loaded visualizer.
Figure 4: The screen shot of the output monitor presenting the teapot scene.
By right clicking on the monitor window, a popup menu will be shown which gives you some opportunities which depend to currently loaded visualizer. Changing the camera configuration for three dimensional visualizers is also possible using mouse. Simple click and dragging, rotates the camera around its look at point and dragging with pressed Ctrl key, pans the camera. You can zoom in and out, using mouse scroll and change distance of camera from its look at point using mouse scroll with pressed Ctrl key.
Output data format
Computed runtime statistics of any loaded binary, can be exported in text file format for using in other application. The system computes update time, size of search space, number of consistency checking, changed voxels since last time step and total number of occupied voxels for each time step.
Update Time (s)
5.788446
6.291069
6.108727
6.354366
5.819961
5.844289
5.809824
5.886288
5.800199
5.774696
Search Space
24717
24762 24731 24599 24621 24959 24658 24729 24753 24566
Consistency Checks
94187
94573 94216 93450 93377 95124 94212 94115 94184 93495
Changed Voxels
13427
568 1054 1077 1104 1266 1376 1243 1258 1220
Voxels Count
13427
13499 13507 13430 13416 13574 13508 13479 13507 13435
The output file simply contains a line for each of these data and the result of successive time steps are separated by a tab character. The output file can be easily imported to the excel using simple copy and paste commands. The part above shows the content of an example output file.