TeleSculptor

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Introduction

Welcome to TeleSculptor. This software is free and open source software developed by Kitware under multiple SBIR contracts for DARPA and AFRL. The purpose of the software is to calibrate cameras and extract 3D information from video and images, especially aerial video. The software is designed to have different workflows that can either improve the manual modelling process in SketchUp or provide fully automatic 3D reconstruction.

TeleSculptor is a cross-platform desktop application for Windows, Linux, and Mac. This document uses the Windows version of the application to illustrate usage, but everything should work nearly the same on other platforms.

TeleSculptor v1.2.0 marks the third official release of the software. Please refer to the Release Notes for details on all the changes. While TeleSculptor continues to become more broadly useful across imaging scenarios, it is still optimized for the use case of aerial video flying a 360-degree orbit around a target object. TeleSculptor will give best results on a video clip containing one orbit around an object. We will improve robustness on more general imaging scenarios in future releases.

Branding: Origins and Destinations

TeleSculptor has its origins in a software project developed as “MAP-Tk”, the Motion-imagery Aerial Photogrammetry Toolkit. The original software was not an end user application but a collection of developer tools and libraries. As the software evolved, it developed a graphical application that we now call TeleSculptor. At the same time, the software libraries of MAP-Tk were reorganized into a new, broader toolkit called KWIVER (Kitware Image and Video Exploitation and Retrieval). So, the original MAP-Tk has dissolved away leaving behind a TeleSculptor application powered by KWIVER. However, some uses of the name MAP-Tk may persist for historical reasons.

Getting Started