Reprinted (with minor corrections) from: RADIUS: Image Understanding for Imagery Intelligence, Os- car Firshein and Tom Strat (Eds.). San Mateo (CA): Morgan Kaufmann. 1997. The RADIUS Common Development Environment * Aaron J. Heller and Lynn H. Quam Artificial Intelligence Center, SRI International 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025 E- MAIL : {heller,quam}@ai.sri.com Abstract The RADIUS Common Development Environment (RCDE) pulls together many diverse functions into an integrated whole. The main goal of the envi- ronment is to provide a system to carry out inter- active cartographic modeling of three-dimensional scenes from multiple images, as well as to provide an infrastructure to support the research in, and im- plementation of, image-understanding-based algo- rithms for this and other tasks. In addition, the RCDE provides the foundation for the RADIUS Testbed System. 1 Introduction The RCDE contains facilities for CAD-system-like three-dimensional (3-D) modeling, image process- ing, electronic-light-table image viewing and men- suration, frame and non-frame camera photogram- metry, and photo-realistic rendering. The cartographic features and data that can be en- tered include multiple images, camera models, digi- * This work was sponsored by Lockheed-Martin Corpora- tion under contracts RRM881032 and RRM960506, the Ad- vanced Research Projects Agency under contract DACA76-92- C-034 monitored by the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center, Fort Belvoir, VA, and SRI International under various internal research and development projects. The views and con- clusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the United States Government, or SRI International. ImagCalc, TerrainCalc, The Cartographic Modeling Environ- ment, and 3DIUS are trademarks of SRI International. All other products and company names mentioned in this paper are the trademarks of their respective holder. tal terrain elevation data, point, line, and area carto- graphic features, and a wide assortment of 3-D ob- jects. Interactive capabilities include free-hand fea- ture entry, altering features while constraining them to conform to the terrain and lighting geometry, ad- justment of feature parameters, and the adjustment of the camera model to display the scene features from arbitrary viewpoints. The major achievement of the system is the seam- less integration and high level of interoperability between and among these facilities. A key real- ization that enables this is that every entity repre- sented in the RCDE has an associated local coor- dinate system. This includes cartographic and cul- tural features, images and subimages, text annota- tions, graphical user interface (GUI) elements, pho- togrammetric conjugate points and even the earth it- self. These entities are tied together through a flex- ible and efficient network of coordinate transforma- tions. This allows each type of data to be repre- sented, manipulated, and displayed in the most con- venient and precise form, without sacrificing func- tionality or generality, in addition to enabling the fusion of different types of geometric data. 2 History The RCDE occupies that rarefied realm of software systems that are simultaneously uncompromising in theoretical rigor and completeness without sac- rificing efficiency, that are sufficiently flexible to be amenable for use as a rapid prototyping envi- ronment in support of experimental and exploratory work, and yet of such “industrial strength” to be Copyright c 1997 SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA USA 94025. All Rights Reserved.