This paper presents a new visualization system, which integrates multiple kind of information for car drivers. The prototype of this system consists of two key applications. The first one is a car navigation system with real world texture images. In this system, buildings are texture mapped by actual images, which are retrieved by the authors' automatic map-making system. The second is a hybrid visualization system, which efficiently visualizes the invisible cars behind the buildings. This system is expected to reduce car accidents that occur around intersections, places where drivers usually have only very narrow fields of view. To realize these systems, the authors propose an efficient building texture database construction system, which, for input, uses the video data captured by a vehicle equipped with multiple video cameras and running along the street. To demonstrate the effectiveness of their system, they present some experimental results with actual outdoor environmental data.
Abstract