Telemetry-Based Depth Recovery for Virtual Factory Construction and Extension to Remote Facility Management

The fast construction of a Virtual Factory model without using a CAD package can be made possible by using computer vision techniques. In order to create a realistic Virtual Manufacturing environment, especially when such a model has to be created in correlation to an existing facility, a reliable algorithm that extracts 3D models from camera images is needed, and this requires exact knowledge of the camera location when capturing images. In this paper, we describe an approach for depth recovery from 2D images based on tracking a camera within the environment. We also explore the extension of our telemetry-based algorithm to remote facility management, by tracking and synchronizing human motion on the shop floor with motion of an avatar in a Virtual Environment representing the same shop floor.