LIDAR-based Virtual Environment Study for Disaster Response Scenarios

In the event of natural or man-made disasters, many videos may be collected by civilians and surveillance cameras that can be extremely useful for first responders trying to ascertain the extent of the damage. However, watching and analyzing numerous videos on separate screens can be a cumbersome task. Registering a set of 2D videos with a 3D model can provide an intuitive venue for viewing multiple videos simultaneously. In such a setup, it is likely that the user will want to work with the dynamic 3D environment from a remote location, requiring that videos be transferred over a network to be registered with a 3D model. In this paper, we propose combining the fields of computer vision, cloud computing, and high-speed networking to create a system that takes in HD videos, streams the data to a server where a dynamic 3D model is constructed, and provides a virtual scene navigation program for viewing the videos in a 3D scene from a mobile device. We test transferring the data of interest over different types of networks and processing the videos on various server configurations to determine the capabilities of such a system and the necessary requirements for it to provide a high-quality user experience.