See a Sea Change: 3D Researchers Bring Naval History to Life

[Boats]

See a Sea Change: 3D Researchers Bring Naval History to Life
By: Rick Merritt - Nvidia News 11-18-22
Re: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/1...pwrecks-perth/

See a Sea Change: 3D Researchers Bring Naval History to Life
A half-million pictures of two shipwrecks will blend into lifelike VR/AR exhibits thanks to accelerated computing.
November 18, 2022 by RICK MERRITT
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Museumgoers will be able to explore two sunken WWII ships as if they were scuba divers on the ocean floor, thanks to work at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Exhibits in development, for display in Australia and potentially further afield, will use exquisitely detailed 3D models the researchers are creating to tell the story of one of the nation’s greatest naval battles.

On Nov. 19, 1941, Australia’s HMAS Sydney (II) and Germany’s HSK Kormoran lobbed hundreds of shells in a duel that lasted less than an hour. More than 700 died, including every sailor on the Sydney. Both ships sank 8,000 feet, 130 miles off the coast of Western Australia, not to be discovered for decades.

Photo link: https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/...uiser.jpg.webp
HMAS Sydney (II) in 1940. (Photo: Allan C. Green from the State Library of Victoria)

Andrew Woods, an expert in stereoscopic 3D visualization and associate professor at Curtin, built an underwater rig with more than a dozen video and still cameras to capture details of the wrecks in 2015.

Ash Doshi, a computer vision specialist and senior research officer at Curtin, is developing and running software on NVIDIA GPUs that stitches the half-million pictures and 300 hours of video they took into virtual and printed 3D models.

3D at Battleship Scale:
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It’s hard, pioneering work in a process called photogrammetry. Commercially available software maxes out at around 10,000 images.

“It’s highly computationally intensive — when you double the number of images, you quadruple the compute requirements,” said Woods, who manages the Curtin HIVE, a lab with four advanced visualization systems.

“It would’ve taken a thousand years to process with our existing systems, even though they are fairly fast,” he said.

When completed next year, the work will have taken less than three years, thanks to systems at the nearby Pawsey Supercomputing Centre using NVIDIA V100 and prior-generation GPUs.

Speed Enables Iteration:
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Accelerated computing is critical because the work is iterative. Images must be processed, manipulated and then reprocessed.

For example, Woods said a first pass on a batch of 400 images would take 10 hours on his laptop. By contrast, he could run a first pass in 10 minutes on his system with two NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs awarded through NVIDIA’s Applied Research Accelerator Program.

It would take a month to process 8,000 images on the lab’s fast PCs, work the supercomputer could handle in a day. “Rarely would anyone in industry wait a month to process a dataset,” said Woods.

From Films to VR (virtual Reality):

Local curators can’t wait to get the Sydney and Kormoran models on display. Half the comments on their Tripadvisor page already celebrate 3D films the team took of the wrecks.

The digital models will more deeply engage museumgoers with interactive virtual and augmented reality exhibits and large-scale 3D prints.

“These 3D models really help us unravel the story, so people can appreciate the history,” Woods said.

Photo link: https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/...8x383.jpg.webp
In a video call, Woods and Doshi show how forces embedded an anchor in the Kormoran’s hull as it sank.

The exhibits are expected to tour museums in Perth and Sydney, and potentially cities in Germany and the U.K., where the ships were built.

When the project is complete, the researchers aim to make their code available so others can turn historic artifacts on the seabed into rare museum pieces. Woods expects the software could also find commercial uses monitoring undersea pipelines, oil and gas rigs and more.

A Real-Time Tool:
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On the horizon, the researchers want to try Instant NeRF, an inverse rendering tool NVIDIA researchers developed to turn 2D images into 3D models in real time.

Woods imagines using it on future shipwreck surveys, possibly running on an NVIDIA DGX System on the survey vessel. It could provide previews in near real time based on images gathered by remotely operated underwater vehicles on the ocean floor, letting the team know when it has enough data to take back for processing on a supercomputer.

“We really don’t want to return to base to find we’ve missed a spot,” said Woods.

Woods’ passion for 3D has its roots in the sea.

“I saw the movie Jaws 3D when I was a teenager, and the images of sharks exploding out of the screen are in part responsible for taking me down this path,” he said.

The researchers released the video below to commemorate the 81st anniversary of the sinking of the WWII ships.

https://hive.curtin.edu.au/SK81st

Categories: Supercomputing

Tags: 3D | GPU Computing | High Performance Computing | Parallel Computing | Scientific Visualization | Supercomputing | Virtual Reality
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Personal note: The seas are littered with ships from all ages. It's a wonder in itself
to see these lost vessels of the sea. Not knowing how many may still be inside
these ships of the sea - and how they were lost and eventually sunk.

Many such prayer's have been said for these Sailors of the Sea. Here's one
I picked out as an example:
Re: https://classicalpoets.org/2022/02/0...s-a-tweedie/#/

Titled: Those Who Go Down to the Sea in Ships
By: A poetic paraphrase of Psalm 107:23-30
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Those Who Go Down to the Sea in Ships
a poetic paraphrase of Psalm 107:23-30

The men who go down to the sea in their ships,
Who sail on the water and pursue their trade,
The sound of the sea echoes back from their lips;
Their eyes see the wonders of what God has made.

Then God gives the word and the winds start to blow,
Releasing the waves to rise up and be free.
They mount to the heavens above all below
And fall to the depths of the fathomless sea.

The sailors’ hearts melt as the tempest bears down,
They reel to and fro, as if drunk on new wine
And helplessly cling to the mast lest they drown
While crying out to God to be spared from the brine.

The Lord hears their plea, as their cries fill the air,
By grace stills the storm and becalms every wave.
And then they are glad, for the Lord heard their prayer
And guides them to harbor, and spares them the grave.
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See below: About the writer(s) & researcher(s):

James A. Tweedie is a retired pastor living in Long Beach, Washington. He has written
and published six novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of poetry including Mostly Sonnets, all with Dunecrest Press. His poems have been published nationally and internationally in The Lyric, Poetry Salzburg (Austria) Review, California Quarterly, Asses of Parnassus, Lighten Up Online, Better than Starbucks, WestWard Quarterly, Society of Classical Poets, and The Chained Muse.
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Closing: May you all rest in peace knowing you are not forgotten:
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