link to my website with most of the documentation: https://www.loriechen.com/work/dead-things-in-jars
Most of my documentation is on my website but I will try to summarize a bit of it here.
Radiance fields are a (somewhat) newer type of 3D representation. Gaussian splats and NeRFs are view-dependent representations of real life objects, meaning that the image rendered relies of what POV the camera is positioned in. This makes these radiance fields ideal for objects that are reflective, transparent, or translucent, A.K.A. dead things in jars.
For this final project, I mainly worked on coordinating with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to capture their specimen and make new splats. This is my last attempt at using Postshot. I changed the way I captured the specimen, by using stagnant lighting and videoing around the target. However, moving forward, it would make the most sense to me to using the aruco targets to establish a ground truth and fix the results from the sfm algorithm. There are parts of the draco video and most apparent in other frogs video where you can see that the point clouds are misaligned between different angles. This seems to be a pretty consistent issue, likely due to various artifacts (or lack thereof) in the glass. To combat this, I will be using the code from the original paper and nerfstudio to generate the splats, to have more control over the sfm.
I’m pretty excited to see where this project continues to go. I’ve met so many interesting people (from PhD students to people who’ve worked at Pixar) via talking about this project at our final exhibition or at a poster session. Rest assured, at some point next semester, I will be making a website of pickled things.