=================== Call for Papers 3D Reconstruction and Visualization of Large Scale Environments Special issue of IEEE CG&A, November/December 2003 Submissions due: March 1, 2003 Acceptance notices: June 23, 2003 Final revisions due: July 22, 2003 We are entering an era when the acquisition of 3D data will be ubiquitous, continuous, and massive. These data are coming from multiple sources including high-resolution, geo-corrected imagery from aerial photography and satellites; ground-based close-up images of buildings and urban features; 3D point clouds from airborne laser range-finding systems, such as LIDAR; and imagery from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Now mobile geo-located systems are being developed, some containing calibrated laser range-finders and cameras, that will collect street-level detail at unprecedented resolution. In the future, mobile individuals or robots will be equipped with cameras and other sensors and the computational power to pervasively collect and organize geo-located data. To make these data really useful, they should be employed to model the real world, and the model should then be available for interactive exploration and analysis. However, the modeling aspect is not straightforward since almost all the collected data has holes (due to obstructions or poor acquisition conditions), and no single acquisition mode is likely to produce complete models. Thus, for example, LIDAR data can provide accurate 3D representations for the tops of buildings but much less information about the sides. Ground-based laser range finding can offer highly detailed geometry for the lower floors of buildings, less for upper floors, and almost no information about roofs. In both cases appearance information is missing but can be provided by properly rectified imagery. The overall modeling problem is then one of fusing multi-source data consistently and accurately. As acquisition modes are automated and models are produced, there will be an exponential explosion in the amount of data available for analysis and exploration. The models will ultimately include not only buildings but everything associated with the environment, such as trees, shrubs, lampposts, sidewalks, streets, and so on. Data organizations must be developed to efficiently handle all these aspects and that scale to cover whole cities with tens of thousands of buildings and an uncountable number of other structures. Since the automated acquisition mechanisms will permit repeated collection over time, both the models and the database should be dynamic. The main mode of exploration for this massive collection will be through interactive visualization. The database must be specially organized to support interactive visualization, both in terms of hierarchical structure and multiresolution models. Further novel graphical methods are required due to the extreme depth of the data. Ultimately, one should be able to fly continuously from overviews of a large city to centimeter-size details on the side of any building. Smoothly joining these different scales may require integration of rendering techniques, such as geometry-based and image-based rendering, in new ways. The purpose of this special issue is to attract innovative articles that explore the above issues. Potential topics for articles include - Problems of data acquisition - Issues of scale (amount of data and range of scales) - Problems of dynamic data; updating models with newly acquired data - Problems of incomplete models - Need to combine data from multiple sources - Interactive visualization of data that includes both acquired geometry and imagery Preference will be given to papers that present results based on acquired (rather than simulated) data. Papers should be less than 10 magazine pages, where a page is 800 words or five images. Cite only the 10 most critical references, and consider providing background in sidebars for nonexpert readers. Color images may be interspersed through the body of the paper. Visit CG&A's style and length guidelines for more details. Authors should submit their papers, with images embedded, to the IEEE Computer Society in PDF format as email attachments to cga-ma@computer.org by 1 March 2003. Please include complete contact information for all authors and coauthors in the email submission. For the most current information on this special issue, go to http://computer.org/cga/CFPNov03.htm Please direct any correspondence prior to submission to the guest editors: William Ribarsky GVU Center and College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 ribarsky@cc.gatech.edu Holly Rushmeier IBM TJ Watson Research Center 19 Skyline Drive Hawthorne, NY 10532, USA hertjwr@us.ibm.com