[HN Gopher] Plan2Scene: Converting Floorplans to 3D Scenes
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Plan2Scene: Converting Floorplans to 3D Scenes
Author : homarp
Score : 150 points
Date : 2021-06-11 06:56 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (3dlg-hcvc.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (3dlg-hcvc.github.io)
| mrfusion wrote:
| You know it would also be useful to work in reverse. I get
| frusterated when house listings don't include a floor plan. How
| cool if a program could go through the photos and guess a floor
| plan. Obviously a hard problem.
| c22 wrote:
| I don't know if this is available where you live, but where I
| live the county assessor maintains a web application that
| contains information about each parcel and the buildings
| theron, including simple floorplans.
| shezi wrote:
| You could try RealityCapture,
| https://www.capturingreality.com/, which is a professional 3d
| capturing software. It has been free to try since Epic bought
| it. Unfortunately, you'll need a lot of photos to get reliable
| 3d models. But playing with it will probably give you an
| understanding of how hard that problem really is.
| CrazyPyroLinux wrote:
| A hard problem, but back in 2008, Microsoft Photosynth could
| stitch together a user's collection of images into a 3-D model.
| I remember seeing a detailed model of the exterior of the Notre
| Dame cathedral.
|
| For people who have physical access to a property, I wonder if
| you could use a variant of SLAM like the robot vacs - maybe
| hack one of those laser tape measures to plug into your phone
| as you walk around the house.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Bringing a laser tape measure and a pen to a physical
| viewing, and just doing this manually, gets you 98% of the
| way.
|
| It's not automatic of course, but you can do it pretty
| discretely and cover a whole house with measurements in ~ 10
| minutes. I did it every single time when we were looking at
| houses.
|
| Also always brought a powerful flashlight and a small spirit
| level.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Well if you take video or many photos of a house you can
| create a 3D model using photogrammetry. I was recently served
| an ad showing that I think Redfin includes 3D photogrammetry
| captures of some homes. So it's perhaps already being done in
| the wild.
| jpgleeson wrote:
| There are a number of companies operating in the space.
| Matterport is one some people in my work have been
| exploring for documenting projects in various stages of
| construction. There are definitely still a bunch of rough
| edges, but the results so far even just using a phone to
| capture the spaces have been acceptable to good.
| rpvnwnkl wrote:
| Photosynth was a great app, really disappointed when it was
| discontinued. Does anyone have the backstory on that? It
| seemed to have a leg up on Google's street view/cardboard app
| at the time.
| madhawav wrote:
| Estimating the global camera pose using non-overlapping photos
| is a challenging problem. This is doable if the photos densely
| cover the house (e.g. video frames).
|
| However, if the global camera poses are available, we can
| detect surfaces in photos and project them reasonably well into
| 3D. In the past, I have used this work to achieve something
| similar: https://github.com/NVlabs/planercnn
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A friend invented a device to do that. It was a small backpack
| you (or whoever is making the listing) would wear and walk into
| each room of the building. After gathering the data, software
| would turn it into a floorplan. It probably took less time per
| room than getting good listing photos. Not sure why she never
| went to market with it but I'm going to guess something similar
| could be done now with just a modern smartphone and the right
| software.
| andechs wrote:
| Matterport does this and uses it for real estate listings all
| the time.
|
| https://matterport.com/gallery/bclm-tollhouse
|
| The "dollhouse" view is really handy for being able to get a
| sense of the space.
| froh42 wrote:
| I wonder how it would compare to the floor plan my vacuum
| robot creates every time it is working. Or whether my Neato's
| floor plans are anywhere near realistic.
|
| Or what Neato does with all these floor plans on their
| servers ...
| eps wrote:
| There is a plenty of solutions like this already.
|
| The earliest I am aware of was a specialized mini "cart"
| studded with video cameras that one would roll around the
| place and will get a textured 3D model that can then be
| walked around, Doom-style. It was made by a Vancouver startup
| was back in mid '00s.
|
| There is also a specialized handheld "scanner" gadget that
| was marketed towards police use for capturing crime scene
| details. You'd just wave it around and see the resulting 3D
| phtogrammetry capture in real-time. Missed a bit - go back a
| wave a bit more. This was in the early '10s.
|
| I'd imagine that this has been ported to smartphones already,
| because they now have sufficient sensor, storage and
| processing capacity for that.
| rhacker wrote:
| > There is a plenty of solutions like this already.
|
| I definitely feel like no one has won the market yet.
| Having something available or somewhat good isn't market
| dominance.
| soheil wrote:
| The floor plans for every house should already exist in some
| database. Planners/builders at some point must had acquired
| them from the architect.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| It would be nice if there was standardization for such
| things. No doubt most counties will have on file somewhere
| blueprints and drawings that were submitted for building
| permits but most likely haven't been digitalized. I'd hope
| that newer homes could have their blueprints submitted
| digitally by the architects but I suspect most places are
| still using paper centric processes.
|
| About twenty years ago I worked for a big box store's
| corporate headquarters. One of my tasks was to add new stores
| to MapBlast so they would show up on the "Find a store"
| section of our website. Problem was that often stores were
| built in new sections of rapidly growing sprawl so the
| streets weren't in MapBlast yet. I'd have to make educated
| guesses as where to put the store on the map. Sometimes I
| could call the store and get some help that way but for our
| international stores, that was difficult because of the
| language barrier. We knew that there was some department
| somewhere in the company that had detailed drawings of each
| store, including precise location coordinates but the company
| was so large, we had no clue where to even begin to find that
| department.
| madhawav wrote:
| There are some prior work that can digitize (vectorize)
| floorplans: https://github.com/art-
| programmer/FloorplanTransformation.
|
| This can detect rooms as polygons, doors/windows as line
| segments and bounding boxes around objects (e.g. cabinets,
| sinks etc. indicated on floorplans).
| linsomniac wrote:
| In addition to Matterport, mentioned in another comment,
| there's FloPlan, which has the agent walk around the house
| taking a video of the baseboards, and constructs a floorplan
| from that. Not entirely accurate, but good enough for a rough
| idea of the layout of the space.
|
| I believe it can also use the LiDAR sensor in newer phones, but
| I haven't tested that.
|
| An easier sell than Matterport, which (IIRC) is a $5K camera.
| FloPlan just charges a per-plan price (again, IIRC).
|
| https://floplan.io/
| diggernet wrote:
| Matterport will also work with a phone, so the fancy camera
| is optional.
| bhagyas wrote:
| This seems to be really well done.
| madhawav wrote:
| Thank you.
| [deleted]
| madhawav wrote:
| I'm the first author of this, happy to answer any questions. It's
| great to see this on HN.
|
| PS. I'll be graduating this July with my masters.
| tarsiel wrote:
| Congratulations! Always great to see SFU students in the wild
| :)
| madhawav wrote:
| Thank you!
| soheil wrote:
| Rent3D++ dataset is not available for download, there is only a
| Google form they want you to fill out and no automatic email is
| sent upon submission. It's great that the source code is
| available, but it kind of defeats the purpose if the data it
| relies is behind a wall or at someone's whim before you can
| access it.
| madhawav wrote:
| Hi, This is because the Rent3D dataset we extend has a "non-
| commercial use only" term.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Very interesting. We actually are looking at viable approaches to
| get usable indoor maps for large buildings currently. We are
| building map based productivity software for workers in factories
| and offices. Maps are important for our use case but not the core
| thing we do. We actually partner with other companies for maps
| and positioning typically.
|
| Indoor mapping is a hard problem because typical map providers
| tend to ignore private spaces, which is where maps are most
| needed. E.g. Apple, Google, Here, etc have great maps for a very
| limited set of public buildings but they don't really have
| solutions for indoors.
|
| We know of a few companies specializing in this but it typically
| involves a lot of manual work and tends to have a high cost,
| require a lot of hand holding, and some very niche mapping
| skills. Also, a lot of indoor maps are intended for e.g.
| architects, contain a lot of clutter, or are generally not well
| suited for use on e.g. mobile screens.
|
| It's an interesting problem to start tackling because we are
| getting kind of a critical mass of technology that will be able
| to start delivering pretty accurate positioning to commodity
| phones. There are all sorts of things happening in the industry
| related to that. It's a bit similar to when GPS became common on
| phones and it became a mass market in a few short years. Before
| that you had all sorts of niche stuff. After that you had
| ridiculous amounts of user generated content, open street maps,
| foursquare, etc.
| iamphilrae wrote:
| Sounds like your company and the company I work for operate in
| similar areas. We focus on the indoor routing and positioning
| aspects, but are quite constrained by the effort of converting
| a floor plan or PDF of a CAD into a map. May be worth us
| connecting on LinkedIn to see if our companies could mutually
| benefit each other. My profile is my username here, without the
| "i am".
| mhenr18 wrote:
| Hey, producing indoor maps of private spaces is an area I've
| been working in for the past few years and I know exactly what
| you're dealing with.
|
| I'd be happy to talk more about this if you're interested -
| email is in my bio.
| Hongwei wrote:
| Hi! If you're looking for a developer friendly indoor mapping
| suite (both for editing and viewing/navigating), check us out -
| www.mappedin.com
|
| Totally agree that it's an overlooked problem and we've been
| quietly working to solve it for years. Early on we realized the
| key was to build "everyman" mapping tools that facility
| managers can use themselves to keep data up to date.
|
| We're increasingly focused on our developer-facing tools and
| I'd love any feedback if you end up taking a look!
| (https://www.mappedin.com/mapping/sdks/)
| amitport wrote:
| BTW the demo link in the sample app does not work:
|
| https://github.com/MappedIn/platform-
| api/blob/master/example...
| Hongwei wrote:
| Thanks! fixed
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| We are in contact with mappedin but thanks for the tip!
| yasith wrote:
| This is neat, do you have any future ideas of making this into a
| product?
| madhawav wrote:
| This is definitely a thought I have considered. It could
| potentially ease lot of hassle related to 3D scanning of houses
| by real-estate companies. Very often, those scans require
| expensive equipment, professional expertise to use those
| equipment and considerable time and effort to capture the
| entire residence. Even then,you will find many holes in those
| scans and floating debris. With our work, one only needs a
| sketch of the floorplan and photos taken from that house.
| Plan2Scene will use data to infer appearance of unseen
| surfaces.
| madhawav wrote:
| For instance, look at this sample 3d scanned house:
| https://matterport.com/en-gb/media/2486. Make sure to switch
| to the doll-house view from the toolbar. There are many holes
| in the scan.
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